Concentric - Volume 51, Issue 1, 2025

Extensive research has explored tonal contrasts, dialectal differences, and sandhi patterns of Taiwanese Southern Min tones. However, the duration reflexes of these tones, which hold theoretical significance, and their potential variations between the older generation, who use Taiwanese Southern Min as a first language, and the younger generation, who use it as a “heritage” or second language, have received comparatively less attention. In a sizable corpus study, we demonstrated that Taiwanese Southern Min syllables are best described as bimoraic, akin to other Chinese dialects, where syllables with fewer segments have comparable durations to those with more segments, and vowel durations in simpler syllable structures are longer than those in more complex structures. Furthermore, lexical tone durations partially follow patterns observed cross-linguistically, with rising tones produced longer than falling tones, and tones with higher F produced shorter than those with lower F. Finally, we observed a much narrower tonal space in young speakers compared to old speakers, with less separation in their F trajectories in both level and contour tone productions. Our comprehensive study delves into underexplored Taiwanese Southern Min tonal duration reflexes, shedding light on potential generational variations and contributing to a better understanding of sound change trajectories.

Lexical borrowings in Formosan languages from Japanese and Sinitic languages are frequently discussed in linguistic literature. Borrowings between Formosan languages themselves are more difficult to disentangle. This paper presents loanwords from Formosan languages in four Atayal dialects: Matu’uwal, Matu’aw, Plngawan, and . All four dialects were found to have been in contact with their immediate neighbors. The donor languages range from distantly related Pazih and Saisiyat (for Matu’uwal), to closely related Seediq (for Plngawan), to other Atayal dialects (for Matu’aw and Klesan). Knowledge of lexical borrowings is useful when reconstructing protolanguages. It also helps with understanding the cultural history of the Atayal people and their relationships with their neighbors.

This paper aims to investigate an array of morphosyntactic properties that constrain the formation of externally-headed relative clauses (EHRCs) in Siwkolan Amis, an Austronesian language in Taiwan. Additionally, it seeks to address two key issues related to the syntax of relative clauses: connectivity and modification. First, I adopt the head raising analysis, also known as the Ā-extraction analysis, in light of island effects and idiomatic discontinuity. This analysis is very much in line with the subject-only restriction (Keenan & Comrie 1977) and the Austronesian Extraction Restriction hypothesis (Erlewine, Levin & van Urk 2017). Second, I argue that the head noun is structurally integrated into the EHRC through complementation. This structural relation is formed by the linker a, which behaves similarly to a complementizer selecting TP as its complement, suggesting that the EHRC has a full-fledged CP structure. A structural analysis of Amis EHRCs is proposed to account for these associated properties and has implications for the syntax of modification in Amis. First, Amis modifier phrases consisting of ma-inflected verbs can be analyzed on a par with Amis EHRCs. Second, the subject-only restriction can be recast as saying that the head noun at [Spec, vP] is structurally privileged.

This study examines whether knowledge encoded in evidential categories is perceived differently by readers with varying levels of certainty. A questionnaire with a five-point scale was conducted to collect readers’ judgments about events introduced by evidential markers in Chinese. The evidential markers were manually categorized into categories, and inter-rater agreement was calculated. The findings reveal two hierarchies in terms of readers’ degree of certainty in judging the veracity of the knowledge: visual > hearsay and inference > quotative > hearsay. Additionally, three factors were observed to influence readers’ judgments about events: (a) whether a detailed event depiction is provided, (b) whether knowledge of an event is provided by more than one source, and (c) whether knowledge of an event has a close relationship with readers’ political standpoints or personal societal beliefs.

This study analyzes cultural metaphors exhibited by a repository of plant-oriented proverbs in Hakka, explicitly demonstrating the intricate interplay between the universal framework of The Great Chain of Being theory and the parametric constraints of contextual factors. The salient selection of various types of plants, along with their biological traits together with factors including linguistic contexts, physical and social settings, and cultural aspects gives rise to their linguistic manifestations and conceptualization patterns. The reified virtues overlap with philosophical representations of Confucian ethics and are further consolidated into dealing with work and dealing with people. While most are universal values, some are more culturally specific, indicating a dynamic spectrum of the core virtues that may exhibit different significances in different cultures. The investigation makes empirical and theoretical contributions to metaphor and proverb studies by enhancing the explanatory power of the Great Chain of Being theory and by illustrating how various facets of contextual factors influence the conceptualization and interpretation of the cultural metaphors of plant proverbs.