CHINESE

• BanguIzai

  1 Jul 11, 00:17

   

  CHINESE
  
  Graham Thurgood, Randy J. LaPolla, Matthew S. Dryer
  
  
  Position of Chinese within the Sino-Tibetan family
  
  The Sino-Tibetan family consists of two major subgroups, Chinese and Tibeto-Burman. By and large the distinction between the two is unambiguous and  widely accepted, despite a dwindling number of older scholars who still see the connection as not yet proven. Questions remain, however, about the status of Bai and, to a lesser degree, Tangut, although this overview provides a tentative classification of both: Tangut is tentatively classified in this work as Tibeto-Burman, more specifically, as Qiangic, while Bai remains an unclassified Sino-Tibetan language.
  
  
  CHINESE
  
  Chinese is really a family of related dialect groups, with the diversity within the different dialect groups often marked enough to make even dialects within the same dialect group mutually unintelligible. The grouping below into six dialect families matches Norman's practice, aside from the placement of Hakka. Alternate groupings are common in the literature.

  
  

  Northern:

  Mandarin supergroup:

  -Northeastern dialects -Zhongyuan dialects -Beijing dialects -Lanyin dialects -Jilu dialects (Beifang) -Southwestern dialects -Jiaoliao dialects -Jinghuai dialects

  
  

  Central:

  -Wu dialect family eg. Shanghainese -Xiang dialect family -Gan dialect family ---Hakka dialect group

  
  

  Southern:

  -Yue dialect family eg. Cantonese -Min dialect family eg. Hokkien, Taiwanese

  
  

  
  

  
  Each of these dialect groups is further subdivided into subgroups, but the larger groupings above are sufficient to make the incredible diversity of Chinese dialects apparent to the thoughtful reader.
       The national standard language, Putonghua, is based on the phonology of the dialect of Beijing but the lexicon and grammar are based on general northern vernacular. Although in this work Chinese may also refer to the collection of Chinese dialects, to any one of the various Chinese languages, or to the national standard, in this work it typically refers to the national language with more specific references used to refer to the dialects or to a specific language.
  
  
  1  Contact and Chinese
  
  Throughout its history, Chinese has been under the influence of language contact. In fact, even the basic SVO (Subject-Verb-Object) word order of Modern Chinese seems to be the product of contact. Norman (1988) and Hashimoto (1986) correlated various phonological and syntactic characteristics of the Chinese dialects with the different language contact patterns: the more northerly the Chinese languages are, the more they resemble the non-Sino-Tibetan languages of the north, e.g. Tungus, Mongol, Manchu; the more southerly they are, the more they resemble the non-Sino-Tibetan languages of the south, e.g. Thai of the Tai-Kadai and various Mon-Khmer languages. In his contribution, Dryer documents and extends this analysis, describing clear, typological correlates of the contact.
       The earliest recoverable Chinese vocabulary already contains interesting borrowings reflecting various forms of contact. Words for 'honey' and 'goose', for instance, probably reflect early Indo-European contact of a limited nature not found elsewhere in Sino-Tibetan. Norman (1988) notes borrowings from Mon-Khmer including 'tiger', 'ivory', 'crossbow', and the word for 'river', found in the early name for the Yangtze (< *krong), undoubtedly indicating not just contact but also a significant early Austroasiatic (Mon-Khmer) presence in that area. Various calendric terms also look to have been borrowed from Austroasiatic, indicating a significant cultural influence on the early Chinese.
       In addition to language groups that must have been absorbed without a trace after they came into contact with the Chinese, there are other absorbed groups that are reflected in the historical records. In the north, Chinese came under intensive, long-term contact with speakers of other languages. For instance, the Sixteen Kingdoms period (roughly 303-439) refers to numerous non-Chinese dynasties that ruled northern China, or at least parts of it, at various times. These kingdoms included speakers of Altaic (Tungusic, Mongolian, and so on) and Tibeto-Burman languages, and others and began the process of the Sinicization of these speakers at the same time as these languages were influencing Chinese.
       In the north, the influences on Chinese have been Tungusic and Mongol, a presence that stands out in the historical records. The Liao dynasty (916-1125) was a kingdom below the Great Wall that extended from Mongolia into southern Manchuria. Its capital Khitan (Khitai) was the source for the word Cathay, used in medieval Europe to refer to northern China. The Liao established their southern capital in what is now modern day Beijing. Overlapping with the Liao dynasty was the Jin dynasty (1115-1234), another non-Chinese speaking people who originated in Manchuria and who were the ancestors of the Manchus. Just thirty years after the end of the Jin dynasty came a Mongolian dynasty, the Yuan dynasty (1264-1368) established by Genghis Khan and his successors. Finally, the Manchus, who established the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), the last of the Chinese dynasties, in 1644, spoke Manchu, a Manchu-Tungusic language still spoken by pockets of speakers here and there in parts of northeast and northwest China.
       In the south, particularly south of the Yangtze, the influences are not as obvious in the historical record but the linguistic influences may have been as significant. Certainly, there is clear evidence in Chinese of contact with Austroasiatic speakers, Tai-Kadai (Thai) speakers, Hmong-Mien speakers, and Austronesian speakers. Most of the evidence of an Austroasiatic presence is found in lexical borrowings into both Chinese and into Tai-Kadai languages. Speakers of Tai-Kadai languages are still present in significant numbers in southern China; the absorption of many of these speakers is reflected both in borrowings and in structural realignments in southern Chinese dialects. The interaction with both Hmong-Mien and Austronesian is reflected most obviously in borrowings. Taken together, these languages have also had a significant impact on word order (see Dryer).
       In fact, pockets of most of these peoples and their languages can still be found scattered in parts of China, although their linguistic influence has diminished to the point that many of the smaller groups are now endangered and in danger of totally disappearing, the absorption of many, many speakers of these languages into various Chinese dialects over a long period of time has had a significant influence on Chinese structures.
  
  
  2  Morphosyntax and Chinese
  
  In Chinese, there was a gradual loss of productivity of the derivational morphology sometime around the formation of the characters (roughly 3500 years ago), and the language became more isolating. A gradual change occurred in the word order and information structure pattern to verb-medial word order and post-verbal focus position (LaPolla 1993a). There has been no grammaticalization of grammatical relations; the basic structure of the clause is topic-comment rather than subject-predicate (Chao 1955, 1959, 1968; Lyu 1979; LaPolla 1990, 1993b). Information structure is the chief determinant of word order in Chinese (LaPolla 1995d). The prepositions now found in the language all derive transparently from verbs. In the past there was an assumption among Chinese linguists that the grammar of the dialect is roughly the same, and so until recently little serious work was done on the grammar of the dialects. With the work by Anne Yue-Hashimoto (1993, this volume), Huang Borong (1996, and Chappell (2001), serious investigation of the grammar of the dialects has begun, but much more needs to be done to understand the differences between the dialects, particularly in more difficult-to-understand areas such as information structure and its relation to grammatical structure. As Yue (this volume) and Ho (this volume) gives us an overview of modern dialect grammar, I will not say more about this, and devote the rest of this chapter to the Tibeto-Burman languages.
  
  
  3  Word Order in Chinese
  
  I use the expression 'Chinese languages' to apply to what are traditionally called 'dialects' of Chinese, following the use of these terms within linguistics. I will, however, largely restricted discussion to Mandarin. There are some differences in word order among the different Chinese languages, but I will generally ignore these here.
       This section has two primary purposes. The first is to document the extent to which Mandarin is unusual in its word order in a number of ways. The second is to argue that these unusual characteristics are best understood areally and reflect the geographically intermediate position of Mandarin between the languages of Southeast Asia and the languages of Northeast Asia. In Section 3.1, I describe the word order characteristics of Mandarin, discussing ways in which it is unusual, and in Section 3.2, I discuss possible areal accounts of these unusual characteristics.
  
  3.1  Unusual word order characteristics of Mandarin
  
  The dominant order at the clause level in transitive clauses in Mandarin is SVO, as in (8).
  
  

  (8)  a.  wÇ’ (=1SG) xÇ�huan (=like) Susan (=Susan)    'I like Susan.'

  (8)  b.  Susan (=Susan) xÇ�huan (=like) wÇ’ (=1SG)    'Susan likes me.'

  
  SOV word order is also possible, with the object marked by the object marker ba, as in (9), though this word order is less common (see Sun and Givón 1985 for evidence from narrative and oral text).
  
  

  (9)  wÇ’ (=1SG) bÇŽ (=OBJ) shÅ« (=book) mÇŽi (=buy) le (=CURR.REL)    'I bought the book.'  (Li and Thompson 1981:21)

  
  Since the dominant order in Mandarin is VO, we might expect it to have prepostisions rather than postpositions. There are in fact a couple of different sorts of words that can be classified as adpositions. There is a set of words that can be described as prepositions, illustrated by the words ba 'object marker' in (9), cóng 'from' in (10a), and dào 'to' in (10b).
  
  

  (10)  a.  tÄ� (=3SG) cóng (=from) ZhÅ�ngguó (=China) lái (=come) le (=CURR.REL)     'He/she has come from China.'  (Li and Thompson 1981:24)

  (10)  b.  wÇ’-men (=1PL) fÄ“i (=fly) dào (=to) ShànghÇŽi (=Shanghai) le (=CURR.REL)     'We flew to Shanghai.'  (Li and Thompson 1981:410)

  
  These words are called coverbs by Li and Thompson (1974)m and different coverbs seem to be in different stages of grammaticization from their original status as verbs to their current status as more preposition-like elements. I will assume here that this grammaticization has proceeded far enough for some of them to justify calling themselves prepositions.
       Mandarin also has postpositions, as illustrated by qÇ� 'from' (<'start') in (11a) and sìde 'like' in (11b) (these examples kindly provided by Liu Danqing).
  
  

  (11)  a.  tÄ� (=3SG) ((cóng (=from))) míngtiÄ�n (=tomorrow) qÇ� (=from) shàngbÄ�n (=go.to.work)     'He will go to work from tomorrow on.'

  (11)  b.  tÄ� (=3SG) ((xiàng (=like))) húli (=fox) sìde (=like)  jiÇŽohúa (=sly)     'He is sly like a fox.'

  
  Note how both of these postpositions optionally co-occur iwht a preposition; however, the postposition in these constructions is obligatory. The number and frequency of both prepositions and postpositions in Mandarin suggests that it is best not to say that the language is primarily prepositional or primarily postpositional. Nevertheless, the frequency of postpositions is somewhat unexpected of a VO language.
       These adpositions combine with noun phrases to form adpositional phrases. But these adpositional phrases more often precede the verb, as in (9), (10a), and (11), though they sometimes follow the verb, as in (10b). Mandarin is thus an instance of a language in which the object normally follows the verb but adpositional phrases more often precede the verb. This makes Mandarin highly unusual from a cross-linguistic perspective: among 199 VO languages in my database that I code for order of adpositional phrase and verb, only three are PP-V, while the other 196 are V-PP. The three that are PP-V are all Chinese languages: Mandarin, Cantonese, and Hakka. The Chinese languages are thus the only known instances of languages of this sort. It is not clear to me, however, how old the PP-V order in Chinese is. The claims in the literature regarding the position of PPs in Classical Chinese are somewhat contradictory. On the one hand, Li and Thompson (1974) claim that classical Chinese was predominantly V-PP and that PP-V is a development since the twelfth century AD. On the other hand, Sun (1987) argues that both orders of PP and V were common in Classical Chinese.
       The comparative construction in Mandarin also uses a coverb construction, as in (12).
  
  

  (12)  ZhÄ�ngsÄ�n (=Zhangsan) bÇ� (=than) tÄ� (=3SG) pàng (=fat)     'Zhangsan is fatter than him/her.'  (Li and Thompson: 142)

  
  The construction is (12) is Marker-Standard-Adjective (bÇ� + tÄ� + pàng). Again, this order is quite rare crosslinguistically; only Mandarin and Hakka in my database have this order, the typical order in VO languages being Adjective-Marker-Standard, as in English taller than Mary. In fact, this is the normal order in Cantonese, as in (13).
  
  

  (13)  gÄ�myaht (=today) yiht (=hot) gwo (=than) kàhmyaht (=yesterday)     'Today is hotter than yesterday.'  (Matthews and Yip 1994:166)

  
  Both orders are possible in both Mandarin and Cantonese, the difference being which is the dominant construction.
       Although manner adverbs can either precede or follow the verb in Mandarin, their normal position is preverbal, as in (14).
  
  

  (14)  tÄ� (=3SG) kuài-kuài-de (=quickly) zÇ’u (=walk)     'She/he walked quickly.'  (Li and Thompson 1981:323)

  
  This is also not the usual order for VO languages, it being more common for manner adverbs to follow the verb, though there are a number of other VO languages outside Chinese which more commonly place manner adverbs before the verb (such as Latvian).
       Mandarin is also unusual in being a VO language that places relative clauses before the noun, as in (15).
  
  

  (15)  [wÇ’ (=1SG) gÄ›i (=give) nÇ� (=2SG) de (=LINK)] shÅ« (=book)     'the book [that I gave you]'  (Li and Thompson 1981:117)

  
  
• BanguIzai

  1 Jul 11, 00:19

   

       There are three characteristics where SVO languages are intermediate between verb-initial and verb-final (Dryer 1991), where some SVO languages exhibit the order associated with verb-initial and others exhibit the order associated with verb-final. For all three of these, Mandarin exhibits the order associated with verb-final languages. One of these is the use of GenN order in genitive constructions, as in (16).

  
  

  (16)  tùzi (=rabbit) de (=LINK) Ä›rduÅ� (=ear)     'the rabbit's ear'  (Li and Thompson: 113)

  
  A second is the use of sentence-final question particles, as in (17).
  
  

  (17)  nÇ� (=2SG) néng (=can) xiÄ› (=write) ZhÅ�ngguó (=Chinese) zì (=character) ma? (=Q)     'Can you write Chinese characters?'  (Li and Thompson: 547)

  
  A third is the fact that interrogative phrases in content questions do not need to occur at the beginning of the clause, typically occurring in situ, in the position that corresponding non-interrogative phrases would occur in, as in (18).
  
  

  (18)  nÇ�men (=2PL) zuò (=do) shénme (=what)     'What are you doing?'  (Li and Thompson 1981:522)

  
  The last two of these characteristics are also ones shared by other VO languages of Southeast Asia, in Hmong-Mienic, Tai-Kadai, and Mon-Khmer. The GenN order contrasts, however, with the NG order of Tai-Kadai and Mon-Khmer.
       There are other respects in which Mandarin behaves more like a typical VO language. The predicate follows the copula, as in (19).
  
  

  (19)  wÇ’ (1SG) shì (=be) Susan (=Susan)     'I am Susan.'

  
  Words meaning 'able' precede the other verb, as in (17) above. Verbs meaning 'want' precede the verb denoting what is wanted, as in (20).
  
  

  (20)  wÇ’ (=1SG) yào (=want) qù (=go) ZhÅ�ngguó (=China)     'I want to go to China.'

  
  To a large extent, the inconsistencies in Mandarin word order can be characterized in terms of the distinction between two types of dependents, what in different grammatical traditions have been called complements or arguments on the one hand vs adjuncts or modifiers on the other. Mandarin typically places the head before a complement, a dependent which is required grammatically and semantically to complete the meaning of the phrase: verb before object, adposition before object, copula before predicate, verbs with meanings like 'want' or 'able' before their verbal complements. On the other hand, Mandarin typically places heads after adjuncts (i.e. modifiers), dependents which are not required grammatically or semantically but which optionally elaborate on the meaning of their phrases; this is reflected in placing nouns after adjectives, relative clauses and other modifiers of nouns, adjectives after intensifiers or standards of comparison, and verbs after manner adverbs and adpositional phrases. Whether this pattern is more than a coincidence, either synchronically or diachronically, is not clear.
  
  3.2  Chinese word order from a geographical perspective
  
  We have seen in the preceding section that Mandarin (and other Chinese languages) has a number of characteristics that are highly atypical of VO languages. Can we offer anything to explain why Chinese might have these unusual characteristics? I will start with the assumption that Proto-Sino-Tibetan was OV, RelN, and PP-V, and that the RelN and PP-V orders are at least partly a retention of these features from Proto-Sino-Tibetan (LaPolla 1994; Liu 1999). Let me focus on two of these characteristics, VO&RelN (VO with prenominal relative clauses) and VO&PP-V (VO with preverbal adpositional phrases). The cross-linguistic rarity of these types implies that there are some causal factors discouraging such languages from arising in the first place and possibly also encouraging such languages to change to some other type if they do arise. Languages elsewhere in the world which were OV&RelN or OV&PP-V and which became VO have apparently also become NRel and V-PP, either simultaneously or shortly after becoming VO. Chinese, however,has apparently retained these characteristics for a long time. RelN order is also the dominant order across TB, suggesting that the RelN goes back to Proto-Sino-Tibetan. Since VO order is also apparently fairly old in Chinese, dating back to Proto-Sinitic or close to that, this means that Chinese has been VO and RelN for a long time. The situation with PP-V order is less clear, as noted above: either it too dates all the way back to Proto-Sino-Tibetan, or Chinese has moved from PP-V towards V-PP and back towards PP-V.
       We cannot answer the puzzle by simply saying that RelN and PP-V order are simply retentions from Proto-Sino-Tibetan, since other instances of OV languages changing to VO have apparently invariably ceased to be RelN and PP-V. What is striking, however is the extent to which Chinese languages resemble languages to the north, including Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Tungus, and Turkic. These languages also place relative clauses before the noun and adpositional phrases before the verb. Of course, since these are characteristics associated with OV languages in general, the fact that Chinese resembles languages to the north in these respects is no different from saying that it resembles OV languages elsewhere in the world.
       But there are other ways, however, in which Chinese resembles OV languages to the north far more than it resembles OV languages elsewhere in the world. As shown in Dryer (1992), the two orders of relative clause and noun are about equally common in OV languages. The RelN order in Chinese is an OV characteristic only in the sense that RelN languages are usually OV. The opposite is not the case: it is not the case that OV languages are generally RelN. NRel order is in fact as common as RelN order among OV languages. The cross-linguistic distribution of the two orders of relative clause and noun among OV languages partly follows an areal pattern: RelN order is more common in Eurasia, while NRel order is more common elsewhere in the world. Hence the RelN order in Chinese cannot be simply viewed as an OV characteristic; rather it is a characteristic associated with OV languages in Asia, both in TB and those north of Chinese. Map3.3 shows the cross-linguistic distribution of the two orders of relative clause and noun among OV languages. Map 3.3 shows clearly how RelN order is more common in Eurasia, particularly eastern Asia, in the area surrounding Chinese (except to the south, where the languages are not OV).

  
  

  

  
  

  

  
       The RelN order of Chinese resembles the common RelN order to the north and to the west, in TB. But there are other respects, however, in which Chinese word order resembles word order in languages to the north more closely than word order in TB languages. Consider, for example. the order of adjective and noun. We saw above how both orders of adjective and noun are found in TB, though NAdj order is somewhat more common, particularly in the east, towards Chinese. On the other hand, languages to the north are consistently AdjN. When we look at the distribution of AdjN and NAdj order in Asia in Map 3.2 above, we see that Chinese is situated between a large set of NAdj languages to the south (Tai-Kadai and Mon-Khmer) and southwest (eastern TB languages) and a large set of AdjN languages to the north. The order of adjective and noun in Mandarin thus more closely resembles the languages to the north than many TB languages, especially those that are situated more closely to Chinese.
       The situation regarding the position of demonstratives and numerals relative to the noun and the position of intensifiers relative to the adjective is similar: Chinese languages consistently place the modifiers before the modified element, like almost all languages in northeast Asia and unlike the majority of TB languages. The only TB languages like this are a subset of Bodic languages in Nepal and northwest India and these are the TB languages that are most distant geographically from Chinese. The tendency to consistently place modifiying elelments before the modified element is a property of OV languages of northern Asia. As discussed above, it is not a property of most OV languages outside Asia. In this way, therefore, Chinese resembles languages of northern Asia far more than it resembles TB languages or other OV languages, suggesting that these characteristics are best understood in terms of areal influence from languages of northeast Asia.
       Someone wishing to deny the claim of areal influence from the north could take one of two approaches. One might try to argue that these characteristics reflect word order from an earlier time, perhaps going back to Proto-Sino-Tibetan. Since some of these characteristics (prepositional phrase and manner adverb before verb, standard of comparison before adjective, relative clause before noun) are ones generally found only in OV languages, this hypothesis would have to claim that Proto-Sino-Tibetan was OV and that Chinese has retained these characteristics, despite changing to VO order. Since TB languages are also largely OV, and share these characteristics, this is not an implausible scenario for these characteristics. But this leaves two things unexplained. First since these characteristics are so rare in VO languages other than Chinese, why has Chinese maintained them, when languages elsewhere in the world changing from OV to VO order apparently seldom if ever retain these OV characteristics? Second, while this explanation may make sense for the characteristics of Chinese that are generally associated with OV order, it does not explain why Chinese resembles languages to the north in ways that are not associated with OV order, namely, in placing adjectives, demonstratives, and numerals before nouns and intensifiers before adjectives. We would have to say that Proto-Sino-Tibetan also had these characteristics, coincidentally similar to languages to the north. And since the majority of TB languages do not have these characteristics, we would have to say that all these TB languages have lost these characteristics, except in the subset of Tibetic languages that are like Chinese in these ways. However, there is a more obvious explanation for the fact that these Tibetic languages place these modifiers before the modified element: they are also adjacent to languages which consistently place modifiers before the modified element, namely, Indic languages in Indo-European. The Indic languages (and also Dravidian) belong to a large arm of consistently premodifying languages that connects with the area in northern Asia where this is found via Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan.
       In fact, even if the premodifying characteristics of Chinese are retained from Proto-Sino-Tibetan, it is likely that there has still been areal influence from the north in contributing to the Chinese retaining these characteristics. In general, it is probably the case that areal influence more often has an effect in encouraging languages to retain characteristics than in causing changes. In other words, even if Proto-Sino-Tibetan was consistently premodifying, like Modern Chinese, it is unlikely to be a coincidence that the languages that have retained these characteristics are precisely those (Chinese, southern and western Tibetic) that are adjacent to non-Sino-Tibetan languages that have exactly those characteristics, and that the languages which have lost these characteristics are ones that are not adjacent to such languages.
       The idea that Chinese word order has been influenced from the north has been suggested by others, especially by Hashimoto 1986. Hashimoto provides a further type of argument for this influence, the fact that syntactic and phonological differences among Chinese languages follow a north-south pattern in that where on finds differences among Chinese languages, the languages to the north tend to be more similar to non-Sino-Tibetan languages (Tungus, Mongolian) to the north of Chinese. However, Hashimoto's discussion assumes (following views shown to be incorrect by Dryer 1992) that the premodifying order within noun phrases is an OV characteristic. But the fact that this is not an OV characteristic, the fact that adjectives, demonstratives, and numerals do not tend to precede the noun in OV languages actually provides further support for Hashimoto's position, since one cannot attribute these characteristics to Chinese being OV in the past (or moving towards OV).
       An alternative hypothesis is that these characteristics of Chinese reflect internal changes that coincidentally led to characteristics that resemble languages to the north. In most cases, I do not think that this possibility should be ruled out, or even viewed as unlikely. When one examines the geographical distribution of typological characteristics, there are bound to be many instances of adjacent languages being similar by accident. However, the fact that Chinese is so unusual in some of these characteristics lowers the likelihood of coincidental resemblances, since there is a need to explain why Chinese has these characteristics when they are not found elsewhere in the world.
  
  4  Conclusion
  
  The most salient overall generalization about word order within Sino-Tibetan is that where one finds differences among languages, the different languages tend to be more similar in word order to adjacent non-Sino-Tibetan languages. In the last section, I have dwelt on the resemblances of Chinese to languages to the north, and have pointed out the resemblances of western and southern Tibetic languages to Indic languages, but I have also pointed out, in Section 2, the fact that the more eastern TB languages more closely resemble Tai-Kadai and Mon-Khmer languages to the east.
       Nor, surely, should all the geographical patterns be understood in terms of non-Sino-Tibetan languages influencing Sino-Tibetan languages rather than the other way round. It is precisely because we find such variation within Sino-Tibetan, compared to most adjacent families, that it is possible to see how the variation within Sino-Tibetan can be understood in terms of languages within Sino-Tibetan resembling adjacent groups of languages. In some cases, it may be that the direction of influence may have gone from Sino-Tibetan to non-Sino-Tibetan, but where that might be the case is not clear.
  
  

  (The Sino-Tibetan Languages, 2003)