CONSTRUCTION DE LA SUBJECTIVITE EN CHINOIS CONTEMPORAIN :
LES MODALITES.
Par "sujet", je n'entends pas l'individu isolé, mais la personne en société, sujet énonciateur. Construire la subjectivité, c'est expliciter la position de l'énonciateur dans cette interaction. Tel est précisément le rôle des modalités, "procédés par lesquels l'énonciateur prend ses distances par rapport aux données auxquelles réfère son énoncé" (E. Benveniste). Parmi les formes qui mettent en œuvre la modalité en chinois, certaines sont nécessairement présentes dans certaines situations, compte tenu du contexte. Ainsi, neng "pouvoir" peut toujours être effacé dans une phrase hors contexte. Cependant, alors qu'une assertion complexe de la forme "Il se peut que X, mais non X" est acceptable (ta neng chifan, danshi bu chifan), la forme "X mais non X" (*ta chifan danshi bu chifan) ne l'est pas, car elle est contradictoire.
D'autres formes ne s'articulent pas ainsi au discours, elles sont toujours effaçables, quel que soit le contexte. C'est en particulier le cas d'emplois apparemment marginaux d'adverbes usuels comme dou "tout", ye "aussi, you "de nouveau", cai "alors seulement", dont les fonctions logiques sont essentielles à l'articulation du discours chinois. Il arrive que ces mots surviennent, surtout dans la forme orale, avec des valeurs qui semblent sans lien direct avec leurs emplois de base. On a : dou "au point de, déjà", ye "effectivement, ainsi, certes", you "puisque, donc", cai "vraiment !", "pour le moins". Ce sont, bien sûr, les mêmes mots que dans les emplois de base de ces adverbes, mais ils sont ici dérivés pour exprimer l'assertion forte.
HOW GUODIAN CHANGES OUR PERCEPTIONS OF THE LAOZI?
In 1993 many texts written on bamboo slips were found in a Chu Tomb dated about 300 B.C. at Guodian, Hubei. The discovery of the Guodian material adds new elements on the origin of the Laozi and the line of its textual transmission. In addition to the so called "Guodian Laozi parallels" (three distinct sections which amounts to 2/5 of Wang Bi's textus receptus), the archeologists brought to light a set of Confucian manuscripts of startling importance, documents unknown before the exacavation.
A comparison of the manuscripts and received versions of ancient texts shows that the variants fall into two main categories: orthographic variants and lexical variants. According to the Guodian Laozi parallels, in few occasions the distinction between the two categories is not so clear, as in the line corresponding to the opening of Laozi XLI, where the manuscript reads neng instead of er. Apparently we are in front of a lexical variant, but the relationship between the two characters is more complicated and will be the object of our investigation.
Some variants in the Guodian Laozi parallels have enormous implications on the understanding of the philosophical message of the work. For example, in the opening section the bamboo text diverges from the Wang Bi's line "Eliminate humanity (ren), get rid of righteousness (yi)" (Laozi XIX) and presents two unattested graphs in place of ren and yi. As many scholars already noticed, the absence of explict attacks to the Confucian values is one of the peculiar aspects of the Guodian Laozi parallels. This tendency seems to be confirmed by the different reading of the line "When the Great Dao is rejected, humanity and righteousness appear" (Laozi XVII): the bamboo text adds (like the two silk manuscripts of the Laozi from the Mawangdui tomb) the character an, which could be read as a conjunction ("then"), or as an interrogative substitute ("Where? How? When?"). It is obvious that different interpretations of an can support or condemn the use of ren and yi as methods to recover the Great Dao. Many of the doctrinal obscurities are also due to the uncertain graphs used in the manuscript. Examples will be shown of conversions of unattested or rare, unorthodox characters which lead to new readings of some crucial passages of the text.
SEMANTICS OF THE COMPLEMENTS OF DIRECTION IN CHINESE
AND THE PROBLEM OF GRAMMATICALIZATION
This paper deals with problems of the semantic analysis of complements of direction in Mandarin Chinese. Complements of direction (henceforth called CDs) form a closed class. Many of them have developed, apart from original directional meanings, also the grammatical meanings.
The interrelationship of different meanings of these morphemes is an interesting linguistic problem, which has been, by now, approached by very few linguists. The main papers to be mentioned are Teng Shou-hsin (1977) and Liu Yuehua (1988, 1989).
The CD analyzed in this paper is shang `to go up, to ascend’.
The corpus for this study was done on the basis of the "Dictionary of verbal uses" ("Dongci yongfa cidian", Shanghai, 1987).
There are uses where shang retains, at least to some extent, its original lexical meaning and, therefore, denotes some "material" result. In such uses shang combines with verbs denoting following types of actions: attachment, coming into contact, placing, scattering about, adding, plotting, spreading and some others.
There are uses where shang combines with verbs denoting more abstract situations such as correspondence, inclusion, attribution, coming across certain circumstances, establishing relations and some others. Uses of this type demonstrate metaphorical extension of the original lexical meanings of shang.
There are also uses where shang seems to have been totally bleached. It has become a purely functional morpheme conveying the idea of the resultative completion of an action.
It’s a notable fact that shang and xia, being antonymous in their original lexical meanings (resp. `up’ and `down’) and in one of their derived meanings (resp. ‘come into contact’ and ‘separate’), can be synonymous as abstract morphemes denoting the resultative completion of an action (cf. mai-shang and mai-xia `to buy’, bao-shang and bao-xia `to rent’, li-shang and li-xia `to conclude (a treaty)’ etc.).
ONE OR TWO LE: A RELEVANCE-THEORETIC APPROACH
Even though the marker le in Mandarin Chinese has been the focus of many articles and theses, there is still much controversy around its function and use. Since the marker can occur in both verbal and sentence-final position, one of the questions is whether there are two homophonous markers le, or one marker, that can appear in two syntactic positions. A simple sentence that contains le often has different aspectual, temporal or modal readings depending on if the marker occurs directly after the verb or in the end of the sentence. However, the contextual influence on the interpretation of le has not yet been thoroughly investigated. When studying narrative texts, it can be found that in many cases a sentence with verbal le can have the same interpretation as a sentence with sentence-final le in a similar context. So far, very few efforts have been made to explain this phenomenon.
Relevance Theory, developed in the 80’s by Dan Sperber and Deidre Wilson (1986) presents an attractive solution to the problem. Relevance Theory promotes a pragmatic interpretation of all utterances. That means that non-linguistic information about for example causal relations between verbs, procedural information in pragmatic markers and contextual features cooperates with linguistic information in the utterance to produce a correct interpretation. In search for relevance, the audience chooses the interpretation that demands the least effort and produces the largest cognitive effects, i.e. the most relevant interpretation. Pragmatic markers have one single core feature but can give different interpretations in different contexts.
I will look at some of the recent analyses of le as two homophonous markers vs one single marker and point out some of the problems with these analyses. I will propose that the interpretation of le, to a larger extent than has been previously assumed, is dependent upon the co(n)text and to a lesser extent on syntactic position.
References:
Sperber, Dan and Deidre Wilson. 1986. Relevance. Communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
SPACE METAPHORS AND THE GRAMMATICALIZATION OF THE VERBS "LAI" AND "QU" AS ASPECT MARKERS
The theoretical basis of this paper is the theory of grammaticalization. Numerous works on grammaticalization (Hopper & Traugott, 1993; Heine & Traugott, 1991) have demonstrated that generally the function words have gone through a process of transformation from lexical into grammatical form.
This main goal of this paper is to verify if and how the motion verbs lai (to come) and qu (to go) confirm the universal principles of grammaticalization and to investigate the mechanism that generates the behaviour of these two verbs as function words, particularly as aspect markers. On the basis of numerous examples from Modern Chinese I will try to make a semantic typology of the verbs that combine with lai and qu in order to identify to what degree these two verbs have lost their notional content, becoming aspect markes. I am interested to see to what extent this grammaticalization process is due to these verbal combinations and which are the semantical relations involved. I will check if they have developed symmetrical values, being antonymic pairs.
The paper will try to demonstrate that the cognitive mechanism that is at work in the process of the grammaticalization of these two verbs implies the spatial basis of conceptual metaphor, especially "Time as Space’ metaphor, that will be analysed for each aspect value.
DOU WITH RIGHTWARD ASSOCIATES
In (Mandarin) Chinese the associate of dou ’all’ (i.e. the NP it quantifies/distributes over) must stand to its left; there is just one exception to this rule: when the associate is a wh-phrase whose locus, as determined by its grammatical function, is to the right of dou, as in (1). In fact, in these cases this is the only possible configuration of elements – raising the wh-phrase to the left of dou yields a string which may not be interpreted as a question any more: (2).
(1a) Ni dou renshi shei? (1b) Lisi dou chi-le naxie dongxi?
you all know who Lisi all eat-asp which-pl thing
’Who are all the people you know?’ ’What are all the things Lisi ate?’
(2a) Ni shei dou renshi(?) Lisi naxie dongxi dou chi-le(?)
’You know everyone.’ / * = (1a) ’Lisi ate all of the things.’/ * = (1b)
The main question is: Why and how is this quantificational configuration possible? There are two major studies of the case – Li (1995) leaves open the question of why the leftness condition of dou is suspended here, while Lin (1998) gives an unsatisfactory explanation: it fails to work in the framework it is set in, moreover the framework suffers from conceptual problems, too. My aim in this talk will therefore be to provide a viable analysis of (1) vs. (2), in terms of a minimalist syntactic framework.
I will show that the LF structures attributed to (1) vs. (2) are such that they license (1) both as a question and as an instance of dou-quantification, while ruling out the question interpretation for (2) in the following way. If, as standardly assumed, questions must have a Q-operator in the CP-domain, this will bind the $ -type variable closest to it, which is the set variable carried by dou as a distributor in (1) (see Beghelli (1997)). Dou, in turn, binds the $ -variable of the wh-phrase (cf. Cheng 1991). This correctly yields an interpretation where what is questioned is not an individual, but a universal plurality: ’What totality of entities x is such that VP(x)?’, not *’What x is such that VP(x)?’ On the other hand, in (2), if a Q-operator is likewise posited in the CP-domain, it will bind the $ -variable of the raised wh-phrase, since this is now closer to the operator than dou. Dou itself will, however, have to bind the same $ -variable, inside the in-situ copy of the wh-phrase, and this yields an illicit configuration of the same variable being multiply bound: (3). Thus the only possibility for (2) going through is not having a Q-operator, whereby the $ -variable of the wh-phrase will be bound by dou, resulting in a simple universal quantificational, non-question reading: (4).
(3) [CP Q(x) … doux(y) … [VP wh-XPy ]]
(4a) * [CP Q(x) … wh-XPx dou(y) … [VP <wh-XPy>]] <…> marks the copy of the wh-XP
(4b) [CP … wh-XPx dou(x) … [VP <wh-XPx>]]
This analysis thus correctly predicts both that (1)-type sentences have a special interpretation in which the question is formed over exhaustive sets/pluralities, and that this is the only grammatical way of representing such meanings, so this construction violates the leftness condition of dou-quantification as a last resort, to provide for the right binding configurations. No wonder, then, that this marked construction is unavailable in all other cases.
References
Beghelli, Filippo. 1997. ‘The Syntax of Distributivity and Pair-List Readings.’ In: Szabolcsi, A. (ed.), Ways of Scope Taking. 349—408. Kluwer, Dordrecht.
Cheng, Lisa L.Sh. 1991. On the Typology of Wh-Questions. Doctoral diss., MIT.
Li, Jie. 1995. ’Dou and wh-questions in Mandarin Chinese.’ JEAL 4: 313—323.
Lin, Jo-wang. 1998. ’Distributivity in Chinese and its Implications.’ NLS 6: 201—243.
TRACES OF LOOSE PREFIXATION IN OLD CHINESE LENTO FORMS
Two recent comprehensive studies of the phonology of Old Chinese (i.e. the language of the early and mid Zhou periods) have independently proposed a root structure for the reconstructed language, which is characterized, among other things, by the presence of a contrast between "loosely attached", schwa-epenthetic presyllables (also termed "iambic forms" or "ciyao yinjie", "secondary syllables"), and straightworward "fused" cluster initials (Sagart 1999, Pan Wuyun 2000). Irrespective of the question whether all of these cluster types can be shown to be non-lexical, i.e. to represent genuine prefixation morphology or not, and ignoring whether non-fused iambic types are metrically true "sesquisyllables" or not, it is likely that the proposed syllable typology, so reminiscent of that of Austroasiatic languages (on which see Haiman 1998), is one of the sources of "dimidiated" or lento compounds scattered throughout the pre-Qin edited literature (Behr 1994).
Adopting Sagart’s (1999) model of syllable typology and reconstruction (1), I will try to find evidence for the proposed set of prefixes (*-, *-, *-, *k-, *m-, *N-, ?*-) in the rich documentations of lento forms contained in Wang Guowei’s (1877-1927) Lianmian zipu, Li Weiqi (1985), and several other recent studies on the Huainanzi
(1) (lexical root marked by boxes; shaded segments are morphologically relevant slots)
Prosody: a(A) / b(B)
|
Segments Segments: |
*[ |
(P) |
(-Ii-) |
Co |
(-Ii-) |
V |
(-Cf) |
(-) |
(-) |
] s |
||||||||||||||||
|
Slots: |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Syllabification: « = insert schwa
Finally I would like to discuss the implications of these materials for a chronology of the rise and fall of prefixation in Old Chinese, and, if time permits, comment upon their bearing on the question of the origins of the Chinese writing system (cf. Boltz 2000/01).
References:
Behr, Wolfgang (1994), "‘Largo forms’ as secondary evidence for the reconstruction of Old Chinese initial consonant clusters", Paper presented at the 27ème Congrès International sur les Langues et la Linguistique Sino-Tibétaines, Paris, 38 pp.
Boltz, William G. (2000/01). "The structure of oracle bone characters", Ms., Univ. of Washington, Seattle.
Haiman, John (1998), "Possible origins of infixation in Khmer", Studies in Language 22 (3): 597-617.
Li Weiqi (1985), "Heyinci li", in: Hunan Shifan Xueyuan Gu Hanyu Yanjiushi, ed., Gu Hanyu lunji: 302-3018, Changsha: Hunan Jiaoyu..
Pan Wuyun (1998), "Han-Zangyu zhong de ciyao yinjie", in: Shi Feng & Pan Wuyun eds., Zhongguo yuyanxue de xin tuozhan, Hong Kong : City University of Hong Kong Pr. (2000), Hanyu lishi yinyunxue, Shanghai: Shanghai Jiaoyu.
Sagart, Laurent (1999) The Roots of Old Chinese (CILT; 184), Amsterdam & Philadelphia: J. Benjamins.
THE ROLE OF DIALECT VERSUS NORM
IN THE LANGUAGE OF YANGZHOU STORYTELLERS
In China the art of storytelling (shuoshu) is closely connected to local dialect. The dialect of performance is one of the main distinctive features between variants of a genre, such as Beijing storytelling (Beijing pingshu) and Tianjin storytelling (Tianjin pingshu), or Suzhou storytelling (Suzhou pinghua) and Yangzhou storytelling (Yangzhou pinghua). At the same time normative language also plays a distinctive role in the performance. The interplay of dialect and norm in the Yangzhou storytellers’ performance practise as personally witnessed and recorded by the author is the subject of the present paper.
Yangzhou storytelling (Yangzhou pinghua) has a documented history of more than four hundred years. The storyteller’s repertoires have been transmitted by way of mouth from one generation to the next, and we can follow the lines of transmission from master to disciple for about two hundred years. The generation of old masters who were born during the first three decades of 1900 may be the last to receive the traditional strict and demanding education in enormous repertoires. The language of their performances demonstrates a subtle handling of various linguistic registers for the impersonation of characters and for change of atmosphere in the narrative passages. The different registers are characterized by different phonological and grammatical systems, some reflecting local Yangzhou dialect (Yangzhou fangyan) (with only minor deviations), some reflecting Northern Mandarin, in the sense of ‘Northern officials’ language’ (Beifang guanhua), while others seem to be reminiscent of local Mandarin (difang guanhua).
The storytellers’ performances are not only eloquent demonstrations of Yangzhou dialect in its present-day manifestation. They also contain a rich material of lexicon, grammar and phonological characteristics pointing toward earlier periods of the language, a living museum of local speech.
ANALYSES OF SOME LOANS OF ARCHITECTURAL
TERMS IN A DIARY OF SHAN SHILI
The important influence of the Jesuit and protestant missionary’s work for the formation of modern Chinese language has already largely been analysed and studied, but probably less attention was devoted to the artistic and architectural niche. Nevertheless, also in this field the Chinese intellectual had to invent new words for translating and expressing western concepts.
Analysing a text written by a Chinese woman at the beginning of the 20th century as a "diary" of her journey in Italy, in which she describes the Roman monuments and explains the Greek and Roman mythology, the paper aims to create a classification of new terms in the artistic and architectural sphere. The paper will analyse some terms, attempting to outline and track down the source of this new terminology: if for example, some words were already used (and thus introduced in China) by Jesuits in their work during the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, or if the source was a more recent work that the author read and discovered during her stay in Japan (a text directly translated from a European language) or in China.
Eventually the paper will attempt to classify what kind of loans they were, if the neologisms used in that period have left some traces in the modern Chinese language, and if they are still in use.
AN ALTERNATIVE METHOD OF TEACHING CHINESE TO THE CHINESE.
Our research concerns the current state of primary language education in China; particular attention will be paid to the pedagogical method called Zhuyin shizi tqian duxie ("learning characters through phonetic notation, bringing forward reading and writing"). After the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, a new era of pedagogic experimentation began: the first step consisted of the introduction, in 1958, of the Phonetic Alphabet Scheme (Hanyu Pinyin Fang’an) which was almost immediately adopted as a subsidiary instrument for learning traditional characters. Since then, more than 20 different methods of teaching and learning Chinese have been tested. The surviving methods (still no less than 20) can be classified into three groups, according to the importance they give respectively to peculiarities of the Chinese language, to mental and psycological development and to technological instruments. The 16 methods belonging to the first group can be further divided into 6 subgroups, depending on the varying relevance each method gives to the shape, sound and meaning (or their combination) of Chinese characters.
Among those which emphasize phonetic value as a key to rapid and effective learning, Zhuyin shizi, tiqian duxie is probably the best known. Started in Heilongjiang Province in 1982, it developed slowly but surely and has now spread to all the regions. Its promoters’ aim is to overcome the main drawbacks of the traditional method, which has been criticized for slowing down the acquisition of knowledge and delaying the development of an active and critical mental approach to reality. By thoroughly exploiting Pinyin possibilities, the Zhu-ti method firstly aims at providing students with a useful instrument to accelerate the process of learning traditional characters. Secondly, it claims to endow them with another means of expression, so that they can not only use it to write, but even to read short texts, thus stimulating their active interest and their quest for knowledge, at least until they can fully use traditional characters. Since 1982, promoters of the Zhu-ti method have been continously engaged in an effort to improve it through slight modifications. According to statistics, the results achieved, if compared with the national requirements, are fully satisfactory. However, critics are still doubtful of its merits and opportuneness, which is partly why Zhu-ti method, though widespread, isn’t yet universally implemented.
Wynn Chao, Gary Scott and Evelynne Mui
THE INTERPRETATION OF ADJECTIVES IN CHINESE
The patterns of adjectival modification in the nominal domain vary typologically across languages. At one extreme are English-type languages, which display a large number of modifying expressions, and allow multiple adjectives, displaying clear ordering constraints, to directly modify the noun. At the other extreme are languages such as Kinyarwanda, which have a only a very small, closed set of elements which can be considered adjectival (Dixon (1982)). In between these two we find the Romance languages, which allow both pre and post nominal adjectives, but considerably less ‘stacking’ than English; and Chinese, where only a restricted set of adjectives can appear directly next to the noun, while a larger set can appear in ‘indirect’ modification structures followed by the particle —de (Paris (1979), Sproat and Shih (1991)).
In this paper we will consider the factors that account for the syntactic variation found across languages, and we will argue that in Chinese at least, the syntactic parameter involved is directly linked to some manifestation of a semantic parameter in the sense of Chierchia (1998).
Unlike Chierchia, however, we hold that parameters in language, whether syntactic or semantic, are only definable along formal dimensions of interpretation, and not along contingent aspects of meaning. This would mean, in the framework we are adopting (Cinque (1999), Scott (1998 and forthcoming), that the semantic parameter leading to Chierchia’s mass/count distinction in languages must be associated with the properties of functional projections over the Noun (N), and not with the lexical entries of the nouns themselves (see also Borer (2001)). Consequently, nouns do not have different ‘basic’ denotations in Chinese and English, but rather, Chinese and English DP’s project different functional structures, and these in turn determine both the syntactic patternings and the range of interpretations which adjectives in these languages can have.
ON THE PEKING MANDARIN PARTICLE DE AS A MEANS OF CLAUSE SUBORDINATION
Based on a corpus of spoken Peking Mandarin collected by the author in the spring of 2000, this paper presents an analysis of the subordinative particle de in the position between subject and predicate, as in (1):
(1) Wô de yì rängrang ne, jïnglî chü lai le.
1S SUB one yell.yell RLT manager exit come PF
‘As soon as I yelled, the manager came out.’ [07429]
I will argue that in such instances, the particle de bears a close semantic resemblance to the Classical Chinese particle zhï in the position between subject and predicate (cf. Mullie 1942; Pulleyblank 1995; Wáng 1981), e.g. (2):
(2) Róng zhï shëng xïn, mín màn qí zhèng.
Róng SUB give.birth mind people look.with.contempt 3S government
‘Since the Róng harbour ambitions, the people will look with contempt on its
government. (Zuô Zhuàn)
It will be shown that similarly to the particle zhï, the Peking Mandarin particle de between subject and predicate
I will demonstrate that the same analysis is applicable to the particle de affixed between a verb and its object in a dependent clause of a compound sentence, as in (3) and (4):
(3) Suóyî tä zuò de jiàozi lî, jië nàr guò de
therefore 3S sit SUB sedan inside come.close there cross SUB
shíhou, tä jiù mò mo xú a.
time 3S just caress caress moustache <ah>
‘Therefore, when he was passing that place in his sedan chair, he caressed his
moustache, ah.’ [08484]
(4) Jïntian yàn de qì, míngtian zâochen jiu
today swallow SUB spirit tomorrow morning just
yùn nàr jiu kéyi mái.
transport there just may bury
‘If he breathed his last today, tomorrow morning he can be already moved there and
buried.’ [02421]
Contrary to the existing treatments of the particle de between a verb and its object (LÛ 1984; Zhü 1961), I will show that the particle de in this position in compound sentences can be accounted for as subordinating the clause it is used in to the main clause and presenting the event of the subordinate clause as antecedent to the event of the main clause.
Abbreviations:
|
1, 2, 3 |
1st, 2nd, 3rd person personal pronouns |
|
PF |
perfective aspect expressed by the particle le |
|
RLV |
particle ne, indicating contextual relevance of the preceding expression |
|
S |
singular |
|
SUB |
subordination as expressed by the particle de and by the particle zhï |
References:
LÛ Shüxiäng. 1984. Xiàndài Hànyû bä bâi cí [Eight hundred words in modern Chinese]. Bêijïng: Shängwù yìnshüguân.
Mullie, Joseph. 1942. Le mot-particule tche. Leiden: Brill.
Pulleyblank, Edwin G. 1995. Outline of Classical Chinese Grammar. Vancouver: UBC Press.
Wáng Lì. 1981Gûdài Hànyû [Classical Chinese]. Peking: Zhönghuá shüjú.
Zhü Déxï. 1961. Shuo de [‘On de’]. Zhöngguó yûwén 110: 1-15.
Paolo De Troia
SOME TOPONYMOUS FROM XVIITH CENTURY JESUIT WORKS STILL IN USE IN MODERN CHINESE LEXICON.
During the XVIIth century a small group of Jesuit missionaries reached China, spreading the Catholic religion and they used their great learning and scientific knowledge to gain the respect and the confidence of the Chinese people.
In order to introduce to the local people the Western knowledge about topics such as Religion, Philosophy, Mathemathics, Geometry and Geography, they wrote books using Chinese language .
These books have been widely studied from a historical and scientific point of view, but not so deeply as far as Linguistics is concerned. Inside their process of transmission of Western culture, the Jesuit missionaries were obliged to express some foreign words and new names with the Chinese language. Therefore they started to create new lexical items, thus giving an unconscious contribution to the formation of the modern Chinese lexicon and, as far as geographical books are concerned, to the unification of Chinese geographic terms. Some investigations about this topic have been done in the past years, but this field still remains widely uncovered.
In the first part of my paper, after a presentation of the topic, I’ll try to give a brief introduction of some Jesuit books and authors which have been used as valuable sources for this research, in order to explain why these books are suitable for this investigation. In the second part I’ll present the results of a textual analysis of some Jesuit geographical works, trying to give an image of the entity and characteristics of the neologysmous phenomenous, attempting to give a contribution to the studies of modern Chinese lexicon formation.
ANALYSIS OF LOANS OF RUSSIAN ORIGIN PRESENT IN CHINESE GEOGRAPHICAL TEXTS OR TRAVEL DIARIES ABOUT RUSSIA WRITTEN DURING THE XIXTH CENTURY
To make a tentative reconstruction of Chinese lexicon of Russian origin in Qing times, I first tried to collect and organise the knowledge about Russia available in Qing China, which was represented by direct knowledge (Russian presence in China) and indirect knowledge (geographical works, travel notes, etc.). Russian presence in Qing China (merchants, Russian Orthodox missionaries, Chinese language students), though relatively important compared with that of other foreigners, didn't leave many traces on Chinese language, except maybe in the border regions, where Russian terms of common use naturally became part of the language of the Chinese people who used, wore or ate the things these words designated.
The geographical texts and travel diaries of the time play a major role, in the reconstruction of the lexicon of Russian origin in Qing China, and probably represent the richest sources of this particular lexical material. Moreover, these texts had a deep influence on the written language, being almost the only books where the educated class could find some information about foreign countries; I therefore support the hypothesis of the scholars who consider the geographical texts as fundamental means of renovation of the Chinese language in Qing time. I first will rapidly trace the fundamental outlines of the development of this literature and its cultural context, indicating the most important and widespread texts which deal with Russia, in particular the essays collected in the geographical encyclopaedias, as:
a) Wei Yuan (ed.), Haiguo tuzhi (1844);
b) Xu Jiyu, Yinghuan zhilüe (1848-49);
c) He Qiutao, Beijiao huibian (1865);
d) Wang Xiqi, Xiaofanghu zhai yudi congchao (1877-97).
Then I will try an analysis of some loans I found in these texts, with a necessary confrontation with the sections about Russia contained in some previous geographical works, in particular Giulio Aleni's Zhifang waiji (1623) and Ferdinand Verbiest's Kunyu tushuo (1672) probable source of some loans or neologisms about the subject.
Finally, I'll proceed with a morphological analysis of the loans, a tentative identification of their source, indicating the works where the terms were used for the first time, and, if possible, I'll try to determine their presence in the written language of the time.
EVOLUTION DES CONTRAINTES POSITIONNELLES SUR LES
SYNTAGMES PRÉPOSITIONNELS EN CHINOIS ARCHAÏQUE
Dans la continuité de la réflexion d‚un précédent article (voir Djamouri & Paul 1997), nous essaierons de montrer que les changements distributionnels des syntagmes prépositionnels ne sont pas le résultat de leur déplacement de la position postverbale à la position préverbale. En chinois archaïque, les SP apparaissent à la fois en position préverbale et en position postverbale. La contrainte fondamentale qui régit leur distribution relève de leur nature argumentale. Les SP argumentaux apparaissent en position postverbale, sauf dans le cas d'une mise en valeur où ils peuvent se trouver en position préverbale. Ces cas de mise en valeur - qui peuvent correspondre soit à une thématisation soit à une focalisation font d‚ailleurs appel à des structures variables selon la période. En ce qui concerne les SP non-argumentaux, la tendance qu'ils ont à apparaître en position préverbale est plus ou moins forte selon les époques et selon leur nature sémantique. Nous donnerons un aperçu détaillé des fréquences positionnelles des changements distributionnels auxquels ils sont soumis.
Nous essaierons par ailleurs de dégager des critères à la fois syntaxiques et sémantiques en vue de distinguer le statut verbal du statut prépositionnel de certains termes. L‚emploi prépositionnel d‚un terme répond forcément à des contraintes de dépendance à l‚intérieur de l‚énoncé, tant en terme de hiérarchie syntaxique qu‚en terme de rôle sémantique en fonction de la valence du verbe. La position dépendant en ultime analyse de ces derniers critères et ne peut s‚expliquer en terme de simple vidage sémantique ou, comme nous l‚avons dit, de déplacement.
Références:
DJAMOURI, Redouane & PAUL, Waltraud (1997). „Les syntagmes prépositionnels en yu et zai en chinois archaïque‰, Cahiers de Linguistique-Asie Orientale, Vol. 26, n° 2, p. 221-248.
PEYRAUBE, Alain (1994). On the History of Chinese Locative Prepositions. In : Zhongguo jingnei yuyan ji yuyanxue, 2 , pp. 361-387.
SUN Chaofen (1996). Word-Order Change and Grammaticalization in the History of Chinese. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Horst-Dieter Gasde & Kerstin Schwabe
INFORMATION STRUCTURING IN CHINESE AND RUSSIAN YES/NO QUESTIONS
In Chinese, yes/no questions are typed by morphological means or by means of question operators like ma or shi-bu-shi. In Russian, they can be typed by the clitic element li.
1. Morphological typing of yes/no questions in Chinese is realized by the A-not-A form of the main verb. Following Chen & Schaffar (1999), we assume that Chinese A-not-A questions contain an abstract POL(arity) operator which triggers the A-not-A form of the predicate and licenses information focus. Along the lines of Drubig (1994), we propose further that this operator is located in the head position of a functional 'Polarity Phrase' (PolP), from where it directly c-commands the predicate V':
(1) [TP SU1 [PolP POL [V’ t1 [V' V-not-V ]]]]
Based on some pieces of evidence that show that POL cannot undergo operator raising at LF, our basic claim is that the extended predicate of (1), V' plus PolP, can be seen as a 'Phase' in the sense of Chomsky (1999) that contributes interrogative force to the whole sentence. The conclusion we draw from this, namly that ForceP is not projected in this type of question, challenges Rizzi's (1997) assumption that ForceP is an obligatory sentence category. Presupposing that Pol° is occupied either by an abstract AFF(irmative) or a lexical NEG(ation) operator in declarative sentences and yes/no questions with ma, we claim that it is PolP but not ForceP that is obligatory in Chinese sentences.
2. Starting from the hypothesis that Chinese has an OV order at the level of the 'D-structure', the paper argues for a unified account of the A-not-A variants 'V-not-VO', 'VO-not-V', and 'V(O)-not'. In our system, '-not-V' and '-not', respectively, are considered as semi-suffixes of the verb, which can be 'taken along' or 'left behind' in the process of verb raising into higher V'-shells which is required for syntactically licensing the object:
|
(2a) [V' V-not-Vi [V' O ti ]] |
(2b) [V' Vi [V' O ti-not-V]] |
(2c) [V' Vi [V' O ti-not]] |
That is to say, in contrast to Huang (1991) and others, we postulate that the pattern VO-not-V is not 'more disjunctive' or 'less grammaticalized' than the pattern V-not-VO. In that all three variants obey island conditions, they have the same grammatical status under a synchronic view. Seen in this light, (2a) to (2c) are basically nothing but regional variants.
In the case of three-place verbs such as song 'give' where the verb has to syntactically license a direct and an indirect object, the semi-suffix '-not-V' must be taken along, whereas the semi-suffix '-not' must be left behind:
|
(3a) [V' song-bu-songi [V' ta [V' t'i [yi-ben shu ti ]]]] |
(3b) [V' songi [V' ta [V' t'i [yi-ben shu ti -bu]]]] |
3. In Russian yes/no questions, just as in Chinese yes/no questions with ma, interrogativity and information focus are signaled by two separate operators: an AFF- or NEG-operator in Pol° serving as focus licenser and an interrogative operator in Force° which is abstract or has the form of the clitic element li. As indicated in (4), li triggers V0-raising:
(4) [ForceP Citaeti-li [TP Petr [Pol1P AFF [VP ti knigu ]]]]? 'Is Peter reading a book?'
In addition, li can be used to mark 'identificational focus' in the sense of Kiss (1998). In this respect, it resembles the Chinese shi-bu-shi operator.
4. In simple Chinese A-not-A questions, POL serves as a licensing trigger. In complement clauses, however, the interrogative predicate must be additionally licensed by the matrix verb that has to be subcategorized for an interrogative complement. In Chinese but also in Russian, the matrix predicate that licenses the question form of its complement clause must have 'factive' properties which are "reduced" in some way. This means that if a factive verb like zhidao in Chinese (or znat' 'know' in Russian) acts as a matrix verb, its factivity must be neutralized either by a negation, modal modification, an epistemic adverb, narrow focus, verum focus, or by turning the indirect question into a direct one, such as in
(5) [TP Ni [PolP POLi [V' zhidao [TP ta [PolP ti [V' lai-bu-lai ]]]]]]?
Here, neither the embedded nor the matrix clause contain ForceP.
CONNOTATIONS IN FREE WOR D ASSOCIATIONS IN CHINESE
(on the bases of experiment)
In the psycholinguistic experiment which I carried out in china in the 90's, based on the principle stimulus - reaction (s - r) have been used 192 native speakers [192 (102 female/90 male)]. The total amount of reactions, given to the 100 stimuli of the experiment has got l9 086 answers. From them the different are 9 112 words, syntagms and sentences. Here I shall not consider the responses showing the lexical meaning of the stimulus as an object of reality (usually expressed on the level of paradigm by synonyms and antonyms but we shall analyse the connotation responses, which come out at almost every Chinese word-s. By connotation responses I mean responses showing considerable/inconsiderable (but stable) characteristics of the word-s, linked with its abstract meaning as well as the assessment that is given to s through r, that is the emotionally-expressive view of the native speaker to s. The connotation r enlarge the semantic field of s, by defining common language meanings and depicting some ethno-cultural characteristics of the Chinese language.
We shall point out at the following groups of connotation r:
1. Responses - metaphors, f. E. S 25 fun 'woman' - r ban bian tian 'half a sky'/l; s 28 chuanghu 'window' - r waimian de shijie ·the outer world 1/2; s 53 tou 'head'- r quanli 'power' 1/; s 27 ban zhuren 'class teacher'- r ci xi taihou queen Cixi' 1/ etc.
2. Phraseological responses, f. E. S 13 duan 'short' - r tuzi weiba (chang) bu liao 'the tail of rabbit can't be come long' 1/; s 50 kuai 'fast' - r xinji chi bu liao donfu 'the burnt child dreads the fire' 1/; s 96 gaige 'reform' - r huan tang bu huan yao 'old wine in new bottles' 1/ etc.
3. Responses - comparisons, f. E. S 4 ren 'human being' - r zui huai de dongwu 'the worst animal' 1/; s 21 funu 'woman' - r mu'ou jiqi 'puppet' 1/; s 51 geming 'revolution' - r baofeng yu ban 'as a storm'/1 etc.
4. Responses - symbols: a) explicit, f. E. S 6 qianianse 'light blue'- r xiangzheng zhe chenwen 'symbolize the calmness'/l; s 45 huang 'yellow' - r qiutian xiangzheng 'the symbol of autumn'/1 etc.; B) implicit, f. E. S 74 'green' r shengji 'vitality' /1 etc.; C) symbols with two or more nuclei, l e. S 34 hong 'red' - r haose 'locherous' /1, r wuli baodong rebellion' /1, r wedding 1/ etc.
In connotation r one can feel the influence of traditional Chinese culture (f. E. S 7 ruan 'soft' - r yi rou ke gang ' softness beats hardness" 1/) as well as western culture (s 20 huxiao 'whistle', 'whiz' - r "huxiao shanzhuang" 1/1).
To summarize I can say that from a sociolinguistic point of view connotation responses 1, 2, 3 are characteristic of female participants, and responses 4 of male participants in the experiment.
A CLASSIFICATION OF THE "FULL" WORDS (SHIZI) IN THE
VERNACULAR CHINESE OF THE III-V CENTURIES
The aim of the paper is to divide the words (mentioned in the title) into classes basing upon the syntactical, or in other words, on the ways of realizing the lexical and grammatical characteristics of a word in a sentence or in a combination of words.
(A similar method in application to other stages of the Chinese language was used by Lu Zhiwei,1937, A.A.Dragunov,1952, and S.E.Yakhontov,1965)
For source-material the <<Sutra of Hundred Parables>> (V century A.D.) was taken as a heavily vernacular text of the time. (It is worthwhile to mention that the "empty" words (xuzi) of the text under question had been inspected in my works before).
To distribute words into classes two grounds were posited:
For distributing words into classes the following procedures were undertaken:
These groups are: