Zhang Caicai. 2018. Phonetic Constancy In The Perception of Chinese Tones. Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series. No.28.
How humans achieve constancy in the perception of an object (e.g., the size, color and brightness of a visual object) despite variations in its physical appearance is a fundamental question in human cognition. In speech perception, phonetic constancy, e.g., the ability to recognize a speech sound produced by different talkers as the same one despite acoustic variations, is also critical. Multiple mechanisms have been identified in the literature to account for phonetic constancy based primarily on studies of the perception of consonants and vowels. For instance, the intrinsic normalization mechanism suggests that critical acoustic cues of a speech sound (e.g., F0) are rescaled/transformed against other cues indicative of a talker’s voice characteristics (e.g., voice quality) intrinsically contained in the speech target to reduce variation. On the other hand, the extrinsic normalization mechanism emphasizes the importance of extrinsic cues, e.g., a speech context. According to this mechanism, listeners adapt to a particular talker’s voice via the distribution of acoustic cues in the surrounding context. However, few studies have examined the perception of lexical tones, which are highly susceptible to the influence of talker variation. As a result, it is not very clear what mechanisms support the perceptual normalization of tones and to what extent those mechanisms proposed based on consonant and vowel studies apply to tones. Furthermore, neuroimaging studies on phonetic constancy are relatively scarce, and the neural signatures of the normalization processes remain largely unknown.
In this monograph, the author reports a series of behavioral and neuroimaging studies conducted to examine the psychological mechanisms and neural processes of talker normalization, using Chinese tones as an investigation case. With these studies and related work in the literature, an understanding of how phonetic constancy is achieved in lexical tone perception is emerging. The major findings are summarized below.
First, in a cross-linguistic study, tone inventories were found to influence the categorization of multi-talker tone stimuli. Mandarin listeners correctly categorized multi-talker stimuli in isolation (i.e., intrinsic normalization), whereas Cantonese listeners performed poorly. This suggests that intrinsic cues may be sufficient for tone normalization in simpler tone inventories like Mandarin where tones are primarily distinguished in the F0 contour, but not in more complex tone inventories like Cantonese where several tones share a similar F0 contour. This finding has implications for understanding how the structure of phonological inventories affects its resistance to talker variability.
Second, without contextual cues, the accuracy of the categorization of multi-talker tone stimuli in Cantonese is low and greatly affected by talker typicality. Cantonese words with level tones produced by typical talkers whose F0 range is close to the population-average F0 range are often correctly categorized, whereas the same words produced by less typical talkers whose F0 range is higher or lower than the population-average F0 range are often biased towards higher or lower tones. This suggests that Cantonese listeners rely on a set of tone templates/representation shaped by the population-average F0 characteristics when perceiving tones without contextual cues.
Third, speech contexts with cues of a talker’s full F0 range (i.e., extrinsic normalization) greatly enhance phonetic constancy in Cantonese tone categorization, and eliminate the influence of talker typicality, such that the accuracy of tone categorization is uniformly high no matter whether the talkers are typical or less typical. This confirms the importance of extrinsic normalization in Cantonese tone normalization. The context effect is the cumulative end product of the contribution of multiple levels of cues in the context (general auditory, phonetic, phonological, semantic and syntactic cues). But it is primarily driven by the effect of phonological cues (for helping listeners to adapt to a particular talker’s tonal space), and the effect of general auditory cues (e.g., a nonspeech context) is small and negligible.
Fourth, the author used event-related potential (ERP) methods to study the temporal loci of extrinsic normalization in Cantonese tone perception. The earliest reliable effects of extrinsic normalization were observed in the time-windows of N400 (250-500 ms) and LPC (500-800ms). This suggests that speech contexts facilitated lexical activation in the N400 time-window, presumably by reducing lexical ambiguity or competition caused by talker variability, and further facilitated decisional processes in the LPC time-window. When extrinsic normalization is implemented in a top-down way, by pre-adjusting the phonetic expectation of a tone according to talker-specific F0 cues obtainable from a speech context to guide the analysis of F0 in incoming speech signals, the effects of tone normalization are shifted earlier into pre-lexical phonemic processing in the PMN time-window (250-350 ms).
Last, the neural circuitries sub-serving the integral processing of lexical tone and talker information are examined in a functional MRI (fMRI) study. In order to recognize speech sounds produced by different talkers, listeners adapt to a particular talker’s voice, suggesting that phonetic processing relies on talker processing. This raises the question of whether phonetic processing and talker processing are sub-served by overlapping brain circuitries in the processing pathway. The author found that lexical tone and talker changes are processed integrally in the bilateral STG, providing evidence for a general neural mechanism of integral phonetic and talker processing in the bilateral STG, irrespective of specific acoustic parameters (F0 or vocal tract length).
Based on the findings above, the author proposed a new model of talker normalization, which integrates the effects of population-level tone templates/representations and dynamic context processes mentioned before. The author also proposed a hybrid model of multi-level representations of tones, from the lowest level of representations containing talker-specific episodic exemplars, to the intermediate level of population-level tone templates/representations, to the highest level of abstract representations. These models should be carefully tested in future studies with necessary modifications to reach a deeper and more general understanding of the mechanisms of talker normalization, and the nature of the representations of speech sounds in the brain. Finally, the ERP and fMRI studies reported here, though exploratory, are among the first to examine the temporal and spatial neural signatures of phonetic constancy in tone perception. More neuroimaging studies are required to achieve a full understanding of the neurobiological bases of how phonetic constancy is achieved in the processing pathway. Future directions are also identified and discussed. (From abstract)
Benjamin K. Tsou & Oi Yee Kwong ed. 2015. Linguistic Corpus and Corpus Linguistics in the Chinese Context. Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series. No. 25.
This book covers many significant developments of linguistic corpus and corpus linguistics in the Chinese context since the beginning of this millennium. This is when boundless raw language data have become freely available as we enter the Big Data era, which affects all of us. The papers in this book, presented in four parts, give a timely account of the latest status of Chinese corpus development and of their use in many areas ranging from linguistic studies to IT applications in this fast-moving information age when data is king.
Part I contains discussions on the computational processing and use of Chinese corpora for linguistic investigations and their various applications. Part II contains discussions on all-time issues of Chinese corpus processing, including word segmentation and part-of-speech (POS) tagging, as well as the extraction of compound words and grammatical relations. Part III contains papers showcasing continuous work in Chinese corpus development, spanning traditional general corpora and many others in specialized domains. The papers in Part IV consider Chinese corpus linguistics from a macro perspective, relating language and society through corpus-based evidence.
In recent decades, many past practical and technical hurdles have benefited from improved solutions, such as: automatic conversion of Chinese character strings into words, classification of words according to grammatical functions or meaning when no overt markings exist in the language, annotation of positive or negative sentiments in texts and automatic conversion between text and speech, etc.
At the same time, successful and innovative data curation efforts have also allowed for many innovative and useful applications, for examples:
‧From mining new words in the web and media to improving search engine efficiency;
‧From stylistic analysis to fundamental issues in education (e.g. Threshold literacy in Chinese in terms of minimum character and word requirements);
‧From pan-Chinese language variation to the mining of paired bilingual expressions between comparable texts in different languages, including patents, critical for the enhancement of computer translation output.
Moreover, this book’s coverage goes beyond just language matters and provides some important insights into the culture and society of the Chinese peoples in different communities, such as: gender imbalance, perception on their own well being; mutual or reciprocal linguistic and cultural accommodation; resistance to accommodation; result and impact of compromise.
It offers glimpses into the future on relevant natural language processing technologies and on how they may enhance a better appreciation of the Chinese language as well as Chinese society and culture.
CONTENTS
Foreword
William S.-Y. Wang
Introduction (in English and Chinese)
Benjamin K. Tsou and Oi Yee Kwong
PART I ANALYSES AND APPLICATIONS
Evaluating Chinese Web-as-corpus: Some Methodological Considerations
Shu-Kai Hsieh
Exploring Individual Differences and Contextual Variations in Child Language Corpora
Hintat Cheung and Jing-chen Yang
Exploring Surface Cues for Deep Lessons in Children’s Stories: A Preliminary Analysis with Aesop’s Fables
Oi Yee Kwong
A Corpus-based Approach to Fingerprinting Stylistic Features of Classical Chinese Poetry: A Case Study of Liu Yong and Su Shi
Alex Chengyu Fang, Wan-yin Li and Jing Cao
Contrastive Corpus Linguistic Studies of English and Chinese: The Cases of Passive Constructions and Classifiers
Richard Xiao
Aspectual Properties and Grammaticalization of Progressive Markers as Reflected in Cantonese and Hakka Corpora (in Chinese)
Shin Kataoka
PART II ANNOTATION AND DATA EXTRACTION
Unknown Chinese Composite Words Tagging Using Selective Back-off Smoothing
Samuel W.K. Chan, Mickey W.C. Chong and Tom B.Y. Lai
Lexicalized Statistical Pattern Matching: Search Engine-aided Analysis for the Chinese Language (in Chinese)
Maosong Sun and Ruying Sun
Morphological Constructions and Derivation of Senses and Part-of-speeches for Chinese Compounds
You-Shan Chung and Keh-Jiann Chen
From Corpus to Grammar: Automatic Extraction of Grammatical Relations from Annotated Corpus
Chu-Ren Huang, Jia-Fei Hong, Wei-Yun Ma and Petr Šimon
Expert System of Chinese Kinship Relations (in Chinese)
Zhenyu Chen
A Descriptive Text Data Format for Chinese Language Corpora (in Chinese)
Aiping Fu and Hong Zhang
PART III CORPUS DEVELOPMENT
The Construction and Application of Mandarin Chinese Multi-level Annotated Corpus (in Chinese)
Huiming Duan, Xuefeng Zhu, Shiwen Yu and Yunfang Wu
Chinese CCGBank Construction from Tsinghua Chinese Treebank
Chang-ning Huang and Yan Song
The Hong Kong Cantonese Corpus: Design and Uses
Kang Kwong Luke and May L.Y. Wong
Cultivating Large-scale Parallel Corpora from Comparable Patents: From Bilingual to Trilingual, and Beyond (in Chinese)
Bin Lu, Benjamin K. Tsou and Ka Po Chow
Creation of a Database of Chinese Buddhist Translations and their Sanskrit Parallels for Buddhist Chinese Studies (in Chinese)
Qingzhi Zhu, Chin-chuan Wan, Qing Duan, Jihong Wang, Nan Jiang, Muyou Fan and Wei Huangfu
PART IV LANGUAGE AND SOCIETY
A Quantitative Analysis of Modern Chinese Neologism (in Chinese)
Rujie You
Chinese Network Media Monitoring Corpus and Empirical Investigation of Language Use on Blog (in Chinese)
Tingting He and Xinhui Tu
Knowledge Mining on Root Word Correlation Based on Modern Chinese Corpus (in Chinese)
Yuqi Sheng
Comment on Global Chinese Corpus (in Chinese)
Cheng Hai Chew
Linguistic Corpus and Sociolinguistic Study (in Chinese)
Jinzhi Su
LIVAC as a Monitoring Corpus for Tracking Trends beyond Linguistics
Benjamin K. Tsou and Oi Yee Kwong
Contributors
Hung-nin Samuel Cheung & Song Hing Chang ed. 2010. Diachronic Change and Language Contact: Dialects in South East China. Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series. No. 24.
CONTENTS
Foreword
William S-Y. Wang
Preface
Hung-nin Samuel Cheung
Article
A short history of the study of modern Wu dialects
Baohua Xu
Evolution of the suburban dialects in Shanghai since 1978s
Rujie You
Tone sandhi in the Suzhou dialect: Synchronic and diachronic perspectives
Xiaofan Li
Studies on the tonal system of the Haiyan dialect
Zhongmin Chen, Meijing Zhang
Tenses and aspects? Old Shanghaiese as found in the book Huyu Bian Shang
Nairong Qian
On the tonemic system and bianyin in the Fuzhou dialect
Hihsao Hirayama
Desiderative modals and negative words in Taiwanese Southern Min: A dynamic account of competition and change
Chinfa Lien
Vocabularies of native Southern-Min dialects: A comparative study
Song hing Chang, Ruiyuan Xu
Rime structure of the Dongshi Hakka
Raung-fu Chung
Nominal expressions in the New Territories Hakka changes in the last hundred years
Chusheng Zhuang
The effect of syllable lengthening: On the duration of syllable nucleus and coda in Cantonese
Kwan hin Cheung, Ling Zhang
Bei-sentences in early Cantonese
Yuk-man Carine Yiu
A semantic discussion on potential complement construction‘v-dak-x’ and ‘a-dak-x’ in Cantonese
Po Yee Chiu
Grammatical change in language contact: On the origin of the“verb + object + complement” construction in Nanning Yue
Bit-chee Kwok
Development of the give verb in the Yue dialects of Guangxi: A contact linguistic approach
Yi Lin
The graphemic representation of English loanwords in Cantonese
Roberts Bauer
On the genetic affiliation of Shehua
Hiroki Nakanishi
With or without a medial in the Hui dialect: A comparison with the dialects of Wu, Min, Yue and Hakka
Chung-sze Tung
The diminutive rime change in Wuhan
Feng-fu Tsao, Wanyu Lee
Nasalization of zero-onsets in Chinese dialects
Shangfang Zhengzhang
Yifeng Wu. 2009. Journal of Chinese Linguistics Cumulative Indexes and Abstracts: Journal Volumes 1-35 (1973~2007)?and Monograph Series Numbers (1982~2007). Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series. No. 22. Chinese University of Hong Kong and University of California at Berkeley.
This volume is the culmination of our efforts to index Journal of Chinese Linguistics (JCL) and its Monograph Series (JCLMS) which were published by the Project on Linguistic Analysis from 1973 to 2007. It follows the same vision of as the Chinese Linguistics Bibliography on Computer (CLIBOC), which focused on a broader coverage in Chinese linguistic literature and was described as follows: Owing to the vast amount of literature which deals with Chinese linguistics, there is a great need for a comprehensive bibliography on the subject. The availability of such a bibliography would free scholars from needless hours of searching through the literature for bibliographical references and allow them to utilize their time and talents more creatively comparing to the efforts on Dictionary on Computer (DOC). (Wang & Lyovin p.1, 1970) This volume of JCL Cumulative Indexes aims to make conveniently all available published contents of JCL and JCLMS in a systematic, comprehensive, and referential format for the use of the scholarly community researching Chinese linguistics and language: INDEX I 1. JCL Volumes 1-35 2. JCLMS Numbers 1-22 INDEX II (JCL and JCLMS combined) 3. Titles 4. Authors (with citations) 5. Classified Subjects 5.1. Topics 5.2. Languages 5.3. Names of Persons 5.4. Organizations 5.5. Publications 5.6. Meetings
Xu, Hui Ling. 2007. Aspect[s] of Chaozhou Grammar: A Synchronic Description of the Jieyang Variety. Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series. No. 22. Berkeley, California: Project on Linguistic Analysis.
This thesis is an analytical and functional description of a number of important aspects of Chaoshan grammar which include core grammatical structures as well as constructions known to diverge from other Sinitic languages, particularly the official language of China, Putonghua. The Chaoshan dialect refers collectively to a group of mutually intelligible sub-dialects spoken in the coastal Chaoshan or Chaozhou region in eastern Guangdong province, PRC. The Chaoshan dialect belongs to the Southern Min branch of the Min dialect group, which is among the most conservative dialect groupings in China, retaining many archaic linguistic features. The thesis includes eleven chapters. Chapter 1, the introduction, presents demographic and ethnographic information about the Chaoshan dialect group of which the Jieyang dialect is an integral part. Chapter 2 describes the phonological system of the Jieyang dialect, including a brief description of one of the most salient phonological features in the Chaoshan dialects, tone sandhi. Chapter 3 covers three derivational processes in the Jieyang dialect: affixation, reduplication and compounding. In Chapter 4, I discuss personal pronouns, reflexives and nominal demonstratives. Chapter 5 deals with three topics involving the noun phrase: numeral classifiers, possessive structures and relative clauses. Like other Sinitic languages, the Jieyang dialect has a very rich aspectual system, which is covered in detail in Chapter 6. Chapter 7 describes a set of constructions, collectively called ‘the pretransitive construction’, which are similar but not identical to the much studied BA-construction in Mandarin. The pretransitive construction is salient because of several syntactic and semantic features, which differ from those of a canonical SVO sentence. In Chapter 8, I discuss three constructions with similar morph syntax, ‘the constructions’, two of which encode passive meanings while the third one marks overt unaccusativity. Chapter 9 deals with negation, which is an area where many features dating back to Old Chinese are preserved. Chapter 10 describes interrogative constructions, which show close connection with negation. Finally, Chapter 11 explores the constructions of comparison, which are also one of the areas where greater divergence is found between the more conservative dialects such as Chaoshan dialect and the more modern dialects such as Mandarin.
Chen, Matthew Y, Yan, Xiuhong & Wee, L.H. 2004. Hakka Tone Sandhi: Corpus and Analytical Challenges. Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series. No. 21. Berkeley, California: Project on Linguistic Analysis.
The volume you have in hand is a gold mine of dialectological data. More importantly, it is an invitation and a challenge. For nearly five years the authors have elicited, transcribed, sorted, and tabulated the dauntingly complicated tonal patterns of Changting, a Hakka dialect of Chinese. The fruits of our collective labor of love are set out in tabular form in Part Three.
Lee, Sang_Oak, Kim, Hyung-Soo & Eom, Ik-sang ed. 2003. The Lexical Diffusion of Sound Change in Korean and Sino-Korean. Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series. No. 20. Berkeley, California: Project on Linguistic Analysis.
Although many studies have been done on the subject of lexical diffusion in a number of different languages since the introduction of the theory by William S-Y. Wang in the late nineteen sixties, there was no in-depth analysis of lexical diffusion specifically dealing with Korean. Although the theory has been well known in Korean historical linguistics circles, and many Korean historical phonologists have accepted it in spirit and referred to it in their articles and books, the theory has never been proven to be viable in a hard analysis. This monograph is an attempt to fill that gap that has long existed in Korean historical linguistics.
Bodomo, Adams B & Luke, Kang Kwong. 2003. Lexical-Functional Grammar Analysis of Chinese. Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series. No.19. Berkeley, California: Project on Linguistic Analysis.
This special issue of the Journal of Chinese Linguistics is a collection of selected papers from two workshops on Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) Analysis of Chinese organized at the University of Hong Kong in 2001 and 2002. All but one of the papers appearing in this volume were read at one or the other of the two workshops. The themes of the workshops addressed the need to explore ways in which some aspects of the structure of Chinese may be analyzed in LFG or related constraint-based grammar formalisms. We will first point out some salient features of the Chinese language and outline some possible questions and implications that these might have for LFG. We will then summarize the various papers that appear in this volume, pointing to the issues that are being discussed and the solutions that are proposed.
Cheung, Kwan-hin & Bauer, Robert S. 2002. The Representation of Cantonese with Chinese Characters. Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series. No.18. Berkeley, California: Project on Linguistic Analysis.
Among Asia’s four major Chinese speech communities of the mainland of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, Hong Kong distinguishes itself by being predominantly Cantonese speaking in both formal and informal social domains. Here children have traditionally learned to read the standard, complex Chinese characters with their Cantonese pronunciations. A related phenomenon has been the spontaneous development of a nonstandardized, unofficial, and informal written counterpart of spoken Cantonese, which has now become widely used in Hong Kong newspapers, public notices, comic books, novels, play scripts, advertisements, graffiti, etc. This two-part monograph introduces written Cantonese in its Hong Kong context, delineates the conventions on which it is based, describes the authors’ recently completed research project in which a computerized database on the transcription of Cantonese with Chinese characters was compiled, and identifies some of the problems associated with the computer-processing of Cantonese. The unique contribution of the monograph is that it has systematically brought together in one volume 1,095 different Cantonese characters; classified them in three appendices according to their availability in computerized Chinese character sets; listed their computer access codes in the regular Big-5 system and the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set; Romanized their Cantonese pronunciation (including variant forms); glossed them in English; illustrated their usage; and cited the sources from which the characters have been taken. In addition, for the reader’s ease of reference the three appendices of Cantonese characters have been merged into two lexicons: Lexicon 1 has alphabetized all the Cantonese characters by their Romanized pronunciations; and Lexicon 2 has listed all the Cantonese characters by the traditional numbers of their radicals and stroke counts.
Tr( i(skova(, Hana ed. 2001. Tone, Stress, and Rhythm in Spoken Chinese. Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series. No. 17. Berkeley, California: Project on Linguistic Analysis.
In comparison to studies on written languages, research on spoken languages does not have such a long history. In recent years we can observe a growing interest especially in suprasegmental features of languages (one of the reasons being the needs of rapidly developing speech technologies). The above holds good for Chinese linguistics too. The aim of the Prague workshop was to bring together specialists working in this field. The meeting proved that substantial progress has been made in the past years, although the approaches to this subject are diversed. Besides the importance of the topic itself, there were also ?historical? reasons for organizing this event in Prague. The tradition of phonological studies carried out by the Prague Linguistic School reaches back to the 1930s. Furthermore, research on Chinese phonology and phonetics was conducted here in the course of several decades by Prof. Old?ich ?varn?, who turned eighty last year. This volume is dedicated to him. The participants came up with a broad variety of views and new linguistic data. The future task is to integrate them in a systematic framework. The following pages offer an insight into the field from different angles - be it experimental phonetics, studies on grammar, language teaching or historical development. At the same time, hitherto unresolved problems are pointed out. We hope this volume can serve as a stimulation for future research.
Chen, Chung-yu. 2001. Tonal Evolution from Pre-middle Chinese to Modern Pekinese: Three Tiers of Changes and their Intricacies. Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series. No. 16. Berkeley, California: Project on Linguistic Analysis.
Mandarin tonal evolution is an old topic in Chinese historical phonology.? However, this study differs from all previous works in terms of methodology and underlying conceptions, as well as in theoretical assertions. ? Therefore, the findings obtained from this study not only redefine all the phonological rules that have hitherto enjoyed universal acceptance in the field but also discover types and orders of changes that have until now been buried in oblivion. All the claims made in this study are based on large numbers of attested examples and concrete statistics.
Simmons, Richard Vanness ed. 1999. Issues in Chinese Dialect Description and Classification. Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series. No.15. Berkeley, California: Project on Linguistic Analysis.
A number of the papers in this collection were originally presented as part of the Panel on Chinese Dialect Comparison and Calssification at the 206th Annual Meeting of the American Oriental Society (AOS) on March 17-20, 1996 in Philadelphia. The panel was designed to address issues of Chinese dialect classification--as issues of criteria, methodology, and proposed groupings, and to promote fresh contributions to knowledge of the nature and relationships of Chinese dialects through comparative studies. Dialect describtion is the foundation of dialect study and comes before comparison, which in turn develops the basis for dialect classification. This basic footwork of dialectology, the steps of description, comparison, and classification, utimately allows us to piece together the history of dialects and their relationships. The March 1996 panel at AOS intended to facilitate new efforts, and promote innovative approaches in these three basic activities of dialectology; and this collection of eight essays conceived out of that panel contains thought-provoking, path-breaking studies that strive toward those goals.
Ting, Pang-Hsin. 1999. Contemporary Studies on the Min Dialects. Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series. No.14. Berkeley, California: Project on Linguistic Analysis.
Among the Chinese dialects, Min is a unique group characterized by various phonological and lexical features. As one of the major dialects spoken in Taiwan, the Min dialects have been the focus of research interests and activities. The products made by scholars in mainland China and the United States are euqally fruitful. It is now time to put together a collection of pertinent articles to give acknowledgment to the results of contemporary studies on the Min dialects. In 1993, UC Berkeley received from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation of International Scholarly Exchange in Taiwan a generous grant to establish the Chao Yuen Ren Center for Chinese Linguistic. It is the purpose of the Center to conduct activities all in honor of this great scholar. Since 1994, as a way to encourage exchange of research experiences and findings, the Center has been organizing annual symposia focusing on different linguistic themes. Each year, a specific topic is identified and invitations for participation are sent to scholars in the United States, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Europe. The second annual symposium highlighted the studies of the Min dialects. The present volume of publication is based essentially upon the presentations delivered at the symposium held at UC Berkeley, in March 1995.
Tzeng, Ovid J. ed. 1999. The Biological Bases of Language. Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series. No.13. Berkeley, California: Project on Linguistic Analysis.
In December of 1993, a group of researchers, consisting of cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists, linguists, and speech scientists, participated in a symposium, which was held in the Grand Hotel of Taipei, to discuss the biological bases of language from the perspective of Chinese language. The Chinese language has what may be the simplest and most austere grammatical system in the world. While most of the world’s languages offer a wealth of different markers on nouns, pronouns, adjectives and /or verbs, Chinese has essentially no verb conjugations and no noun declensions of any kind. Furthermore, although the Chinese grammar does provide for a set of standard word orders, it is also the case that word order can be varies in a number of ways if the speaker wants to emphasize one element more than another. These properties of Chinese grammar raise some fascinating questions concerning the interaction of language-specific features and language uses with respect to various cognitive functions. … All the papers included in the monograph highlighted the importance of looking at biological bases of language from the Chinese language perspective. Authors of all these papers make great contributions for our scientific understanding of language processing.
Luo, Yongxian. 1997. The Subgroup Structure of the Tai Languages: A Historical – Comparative Study. Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series. No.12. Berkeley, California: Project on Linguistic Analysis.
This work is a contribution to the historical-comparative study of the Tai languages. The focus is on sub grouping in the Tai family, with special attention devoted to utilizing new sources from Tai languages spoken in China’s Yunnan and Guangxi (Kwangsi) provinces. More specifically, it aims to reevaluate Fang Kuei Li’s monumental work, A Handbook of Comparative Tai (1977). The proposals put forward by Li with regards to the internal relationships of the Tai language family will be investigated and assessed in the light of a substantial body of new evidence: over 900 Tai cognate sets. In reassessing Li’s work, this work will examine the following questions: (i) What are the workable criteria for sub grouping in the Tai languages? (ii) How and to what extent do differing criteria support the same subgroup model? (iii) In particular, in addition to phonological criteria, what dominate lexical and semantic features can be used to establish subgroups of dialects of the Tai languages? (iv)In terms of available data, what looks reasonable as a reconstructed system for PT initials? (v) To what extents does Li’s three-branch theory remain viable as a classification of Tai dialects? (vi) Can questions of Tai sub grouping benefit from historical and philological evidence, and if so, how? The scope of this study will be limited to some correlated issues in Li’s work, namely, Li’s inventory of Proto-Tai initials, tonal irregularities, differential phonological and lexical subgroup traits, along with the plausibility of active morphophonemic process and derivational morphology in Proto-Tai. For lack of space, vowels will not be treated in detail, although attention will be given to one particular conditioned change, suggesting implications for future work. On the other hand, this study will briefly look at an extra type of sources which are not directly related to Li’s HCT and which fall outside the scope of the comparative method in its narrow sense: Chinese philological evidence for certain convergences between Tai and Chinese. A final more general aim concerns the viability of normal assumptions of historical-comparative linguistics as applied in the Tai case.
Shen, Zhongwei. 1997. Exploring the Dynamic Aspect of Sound Change. Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series. No.11. Berkeley, California: Project on Linguistic Analysis.
One of the significant issues raised by the lexical diffusion theory is what the mechanism of sound change is. In order to understand the change mechanism better, this study starts with examining of the basic concepts of the theory of lexical diffusion, and the evidence that supports the theory. After careful consideration of the old evidence, we realized that 1) to prove the viewpoints of lexical diffusion, we need richer data drawn from speech communities, and 2) to account for the dynamics process of sound change requires a diffusion theory at a population level.
Sun, Chaofen ed. 1997. Studies on the History of Chinese Syntax. Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series. No.10. Berkeley, California: Project on Linguistic Analysis.
The ten studies in this monograph mostly are revised versions of the sixteen papers presented at the Conference on Chinese Historical Syntax, Stanford, 17th -18th March 1995. This monograph begins with the opening remarks delivered at the conference by Professor William S-Y. Wang, who reviews the state of the art in the study of the evolution of language and its relationship with the study of cognition. The second paper is by Professor Victor Mair who talks about Ma Jianzhong and his motivations in writing the earliest Chinese Grammar in the 19th century. Professor Frank Hsueh’s paper deals with the implications for word order, conjunction, and passivity of the grammatical status of the Classical Chinese verb complement. The subsequent five papers integrate the historical studies with the studies of modern Chinese dialects. Professor Mei Tsu-Lin discusses the dialectal basis of some of the constructions in the Zen Buddhist text Zutangji. Professor Lisa Cheng, James Huang, and Jane Tang, in joint paper, examine how negative particle questions evolved in history and vary in different modern Chinese dialects, interacting with the verbal aspectual system. Professor Jiang Lansheng employs dialectal information from many modern Chinese dialects to prove that me麼 and 們 men share the same origin. Professor Samuel Cheung reviews sources of Early Cantonese materials and the derivations of some Cantonese grammatical elements. Professor Lien Chinfa studies the evolution of the Southern Min tit 得 in light of a set of data taken from Middle Chinese and Early Mandarin texts. Two papers deal with the issue of the genesis of the Chinese verbal suffixes. Professor Cao Guangshun investigates various factors that may bear on the issue, and Professor Ping Chen reconstructs the historical path along which the Mandarin zhe 著 became grammaticalized. The editor’s paper discusses the historical changes that ba went through in Middle Chinese and Early Mandarin and the function of ambiguity that it serves in semantic changes.
Huang, Chu-Ren, K-J. Chen, B.K. Tsou ed. 1996. Readings in Chinese Natural Language Processing. Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series. No. 9. Berkeley, California: Project on Linguistic Analysis.
The ten articles collected in this volume are representative studies dealing with important issues in Chinese natural language processing (NLP). Unlike intra-disciplinary linguistic studies, where the concern for cross-linguistic generalization (i.e., Universal Grammar) dominates, computational linguistic studies necessarily focus on accounting for language-specific characteristics. This is because recent developments in linguistic formalisms and computational mechanisms have provided a strong base to deal with general and basic language universal facts, so that the issues remaining are actually idiosyncrasies in each language. Thus, issues and topics in Chinese natural language processing necessarily involve special considerations of the linguistic characteristics of Chinese as well as the idiosyncrasies of Chinese textual conventions. In other words, these issues and topics can be best grasped from the viewpoint of understanding the characteristics of Chinese grammar and texts.
Wang, William S-Y. ed. 1995. The Ancestry of Chinese language. Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series. No. 8. Berkeley, California: Project on Linguistic Analysis.
The question is no longer, whether Chinese shares some similarities with language X or language Y, as it was seen during the last century. Rather, we need to know which of these similarities are due to inheritance and which are due to imitation. The criteria for sorting these similarities one from the other, as I noted earlier, are not yet well understood and far from uniformly accepted. And if indeed the similarities are due to inheritance, the next question is whether Chinese forms a monophyletic unit with X, with Y, or with both [if our tree allows non binary branching]. Questions of degree arise here, and Baxter’s paper, which begins Part I of this volume, is an explication of the probabilistic reasoning that must underlie hypotheses of sub grouping. Indeed, anyone who thinks that we have answers to these questions at present, which are “beyond any possibility of doubt”, will not have read this volume carefully. In Gong’s paper, we have further verification of the Sino-Tibetan hypothesis, with strong support from Tangut evidence that has not been incorporated before. The narrow version of this hypothesis which Gong considers here, including just the Chinese dialects and the Tibeto-Burman languages, is the closest we can come to a consensus at present; but see the comments by Sagart in Part II of this volume. Attempts to posit higher monophyletic units for Chinese, however, do not as yet command nearly the same degree of consensus. These include the similarities to Indo-European, observed by Pulleyblank, the connections to the North Caucasian and Yenesseian languages, posited by Starostin, and the relation to Austronesian, proposed by Sagart. These hypotheses are debated by Blust, Li, Pulleyblank, Starosta, and Starostin, mostly in Part II of this volume. This section also includes some remarks from Meacham, who provides a useful archeological perspective. These papers by Pan, You and Zhengzhang all endorse a wider circle of genetically related languages; besides Chinese and Tibeto-Burman, they would include Miao-Yao, Kam-Tai, Austronesian, and perhaps some other yet unaffiliated languages. They explore different methods to arrive at their groupings, from word families, to animal names, to basic lexicon respectively. Pan and Zhengzhang use the term “Sino-Austric” or “Hua’ao” to designate this far-ranging phylum they posit. If their hypothesis is correct, however, it is doubtful that Chinese would rank high enough in the tree diagram to warrant being included in the name of the root node. Chinese probably split off from the rest of the tree and came to prominence quit late, several millennia from the root. Its success story is not unlike the great spread of English in Indo-European of Bantu in Niger Kordofanian.
Coblin, W. South. 1994. A Compendium of Phonetics in Northwest Chinese. Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series. No. 7. Berkeley, California: Project on Linguistic Analysis.
Northwest Chinese offers a fertile field for diachronic phonological study while at the same time escaping certain of the pitfalls, which plague the study of other dialect groups. The preceding remarks are not intended to suggest, however, that northwest Chinese is a totally untapped field. On the contrary, we benefit in particular from a number of previous studies of the tenth century transcriptional sources. The most important earlier ones are those of Luo (1993) and Csongor (1960). And these have now been supplemented and in fact superseded by the monumental compendium of Takata (1988). This and other recent works of Takata in particular have contributed immeasurable to our understanding of the phonology of the ninth and tenth century northwest dialects. More recently, we have attempted to project this general, late medieval picture back to the earlier stages alluded to above (Coblin 1991). Our work in this area was devoted primarily to consideration of specific theoretical questions, and it was therefore necessary to cite our data selectively, in illustration of particular points. This approach had the drawbacks that it failed to reveal to readers the total picture presented by the mostly unpublished data and thus denied them the opportunity to judge the corpus for themselves. The intent of the present work is to in some measure rectify this failing. Our purpose then, has been to present the data in a convenient and accessible format while at the same time linking it as closely as possible to the structural framework established by Takata. To this end, we devote the present part of our study to a discussion of certain relevant historical considerations and to an analysis of the format used to present the data. Part II provides an historical overview of northwest phonological history as we conceive of it. In Part III, the data are presented in a form, which allows direct comparison with the material collected by Takata in his data tables. Takata’s own arrangement already allows access to the material through the she 攝system of traditional deng yun tu 等韻圖philology. We have supplemented this with a pin yin index to Chinese forms treated in our compendium.
Masini, Federico. 1993. The Formation of Modern Chinese Lexicon and its Evolution toward a National Language: The Period from 1840 to 1898. Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series. No.6. Berkeley, California: Project on Linguistic Analysis.
Although China has one of the most ancient lexicographical traditions, we know little about the etymology of the more recent Chinese words. My goal in undertaking this study was therefore to establish the entity and characteristics of lexical events between 1840 and 1898, and show that Modern Chinese lexicon is not simply the fruit of the linguistic experiments that took place in the context of the literary movements of the early XXth century but in fact developed thanks both to its traditional base and to the contribution of lexical inventions of the XIXth century. With the starting assumption that languages react to external stimuli, I paid particular attention to the impact on Chinese lexicon of those works written in Chinese either by foreigners or by Chinese in contact with foreigners, either in China or abroad. The impact of western language on Chinese lexicon could only be indirect, and take place via the formation of semantic loans and loan-translations, since Chinese has great difficulty in absorbing phonemic loans. The impact of Japanese was far greater. Although different in structural terms, to some extent Japanese and Chinese share the same writing form. (From Author’s Preface)
Du, Ruofu, Yida Yuan, Juliana Hwang, Joanna Mountain, L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza. 1992. Chinese Surnames and the Genetic Differences between North and South China. Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series. No. 5. Berkeley, California: Project on Linguistic Analysis.
In this paper we analyze surname obtained from the stratified random sample covering a 1/2000 fraction of the whole Chinese population as censured by the Government of the People’s Republic of China in 1982. The sampling units were entire “administrative villages” or parts of cities (“residents’ committees”). We pay special attention to the distribution of surnames thus sampled, its interpretation as that of selectively neutral alleles at a single haploid locus under uniparental transmission, and the use of the parameter estimates obtained from this distribution for the analysis of genetic population structure. We compare the distribution with that obtained from genetic data.
Coblin, W. South. 1991. Studies in Old Northwest Chinese. Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series. No. 4. Berkeley, California: Project on Linguistic Analysis.
In the present monograph, we undertake investigations, which deal with phonology of Tang and pre-Tang times but are not viewed as part of the field of Qieyun studies. Our concern is on the contrary with the dialects of northwest China, ranging from the modern vernaculars of Gansu, Qinghai, and Shananxi to the ancient dialects of the Chang-an and Dunhuang areas in the fifth and sixth centuries. In the present chapter, we survey the materials, which will serve as the primary basis for our reconstructions. In Chapter II, we deal with syllable initials. In Chapter III, we proceed to a discussion of various topics, which are of general import for the reconstruction of the syllable finals. In Chapter IV, we present a group-by-group discussion of these finals. The reconstructed system at this point will be semi-phonemic, in that certain sounds, which were probably allophones of the same phoneme, will still be distinguished in the provisional transcription. In Chapter V, the systems will be more rigorously phonemicized, and a synoptic table will be given for the reconstruction as a whole.
Wang, William S-Y. ed. 1991. Languages and Dialects of China. in Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series. No.3, 3-10. Berkeley, California: Project on Linguistic Analysis.
This volume is based on a conference held in Oakland, California, in January 1986. The initial ideas for the conference were contained in a letter I sent to a few friends the preceding May. In it, I suggested several avenues of interaction and cross-fertilization, in the hope of correcting for the unfortunate insularity that specification often leads to in Chinese linguistics. Briefly put, these are: (1) linguistics with allied disciplines concerned with population movements, such as genetics, geography, and history, (2) data gathering with theory development, (3) language group with language group. The conference was the result of the many enthusiastic responses to that initials probe. In the spirit of the above scheme, the pages that follow are divided into four parts. Part A begins with contributions from allied disciplines, Lee and Wong from history, Yuan from genetics, and Zhou from geography. It is important that the evolutionary scenarios we develop independently in linguistics be cross-checked against the relevant knowledge from other fields. All too often in Chinese linguistics, we forget that data gathering is only the first step, and that the real intellectual rewards come from the theoretical interpretations of these data. The papers by Chen and Cheng exemplify theory construction from data, one on the analysis of tones, the other on quantifying linguistic affinity. Part B contains papers on some of the major linguistic groups in China. Wang Jun presents a wide perspective on the features of many of the minority languages of China. Such information is valuable not only for itself, but also indispensable for research on the historical development of the Han dialects. These latter are represented by overviews provided by Ting for Mandarin, by Pan for Wu, by Yue-Hashimoto for Yue, and by Norman for the Min dialects. In Part C, Lin discuss the linguistic situation of Beijing, and Qian describes the speech of Shanghai. Often new patterns of linguistic usage are created at socio-cultural centers such as these two cities. Once established at the centers, these patterns radiate outward to bring out change at other sites. There are many more great cities in China, and I hope that these two pioneering studies can stimulate future research on these other cities. Similarly, I hope there will be more overviews of linguistic groups in China, on the models of the papers in Part B. The volume closes with remarks by Pulleyblank, Mei and Hsieh, commenting on different papers at the conference, each providing a distinct perspective on the field. The topics discussed in this volume, the languages and dialects of China, are significant from at least two complementary vantage points: Chinese studies, and linguistic theory. The goals of Chinese studies are to understand the activities and the behaviors of the Chinese peoples, both in the past and in the present. One of the major avenues toward achieving these goals is through studying their languages. (From editor’s introduction)
Cheng, Tsai Fa. 1985. Ancient Chinese and Early Mandarin. Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series. No. 2. Berkeley, California: Project on Linguistic Analysis.
This study has been devoted to the establishment of the phonological system of Ancient Chinese and Early Mandarin. To reanalyze the sound system of Ancient Chinese, reconstructions by various scholars were regarded as something similar to “dialects” of Ancient Chinese and compared as if by the comparative method. We referred to few modern dialects or sound systems of any stages, yet arrived at a neat and symmetrical seven vowel systems [in] the second chapter. In contrast to the large or unnatural vowel systems of other writers, I believe we have reached a fairly adequate phonological system for Ancient Chinese through a method of “reconstruction over reconstruction”. For early Mandarin, two approaches were taken, one synchronic and one diachronic. The aim was to determine the sounds of Early Mandarin using very little information about other stages of the Chinese language, and then to try to fit the reconstructed sound system of Early Mandarin into the context of history as verification of the adequacy of our reconstruction.
Chang, Namgui. 1984. Phonological variations in 15th Century Korean. Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series. No.1. Berkeley, California: Project on Linguistic Analysis.
Fifteenth century MK abounds with data, which suggest such aspects of diachronic events “caught”, so to speak, in a transitional state. The vowel system reveals both the earlier harmonic system and altered relations between vowels, the aspiration and tenseness features of obstruents show incomplete diachronic processes, and the accentual system appears to be in its last stage of transformation immediately before its extinction as a phonemic feature, as we will closely examine them in subsequent chapters. In the first chapter, we will attempt to briefly describe the fundamental characteristics of Korean phonology by sketching Morpheme Structures Conditions (MSC) and Surface Phonetic Constraints (SPC) of modern Korean as represented in the Seoul dialect. I consider these to be crucial components of phonology which functionally determine and motivate the existence and forms of phonological rules of all types. In the second chapter, the word-initial consonant clusters and the process of their reductions, which created the modern tenseness feature for obstruents, will be examined, and in the third chapter, the origin and the process of development of the aspiration feature as revealed in obstruents of MK and its subsequent cognate system. The fourth chapter will be concerned with the MK vowel system in the process of a major change, which I call “vowel rotation”, profoundly affecting the character of the MK vowel system to bring about the kind existing in modern Korean. The fifth chapter will deal with the MK prosodic system as revealed in the so-called “side dot” markings in the 15th and 16th century texts. These remarkable historical texts consistently record “tones” or pitch characteristics enabling us today to closely examine and analyze the MK prosodic system to a considerable extent. These pitch marks will be shown here as reflecting the consequences of various interactions between two prosodic subsystems in MK; one of the lexical accentual system and another of the syntactic phrase marking. Of particular interest in these areas of MK phonology is not so much in the analysis of diachronic changes from one state to another as their effects on the synchronic state of MK phonology entailing phonological variations, structural asymmetry, gaps and apparent contradictions in historical evidences. (From Author’s Introduction)
