Title: What distinguish synonymous constructions: A corpusbased study of Mandarin liandou and lianye constr
1What distinguish synonymous constructions? A
corpus-based study of Mandarin liandou and
lianye constructions
- Chueh-chen Wang
- Graduate Institute of Linguistics
- National Taiwan University
- Oct 5, 2006
2Acknowledgement
- National Science Council, Republic of China
(NSC94-2411-H-002-012) - Prof. I-wen Su and all my group members of the
NTU Cognitive Pragmatics Lab - Prof. Lillian M. Huang and her students of the
Introduction to Linguistic Analysis course
3Introduction
- The aspiration of the constructionist approaches
- The question posed by synonymous constructions
(Stubbs 2001 36-39)
4Mandarin liandou and lianye Even
- Are these two linguistic patterns synonymous? Are
they really constructions? - Yes to both questions
- Strong intuition among native speakers and
researchers - Support from corpus data
5Literature review (1)
- Syntax, semantics, and pragmatics
- Li 1947 38-39 Hu 1962 281 Chao 1968 766
Wang 1971a 256, 1971b 229 Lu 1980 325 Li and
Thompson 1981 338 Zhu 1982 190-191 Wang 1987
271-272 Lu 1992 338-339 Zhao 1992 43-44 Chu
and Ji 1999 64 Li 2005 109-110 et passim
6Literature review (2)
- Pragmatic function (e.g. Shyu 2001 Paul 2002)
focalization - Undifferentiated in previous studies
liandou/ye, glossed identically - Interchangeable (Tsao 1979 232 Li and Thompson
1981 338 Zhu 1982 191 Cui 1993 124 Hole
2004 183 Ye 2004 48 Cao 2005 20)
7Principle of No Synonym of Grammatical Forms
- Givón 1985 Kirsner 1985 Langacker 1985 Clark
1987 Wierzbicka 1988 et passim - A difference in syntactic form always spells a
difference in meaning (Goldberg 1995 3) - CxGs constructional network (Croft and Cruse
2004)
8Research questions
- Are liandou and lianye undifferentiated and
interchangeable? - If not, how are they distinguished in language
use?
9Theoretical assumptions
- The constructionist approaches the notion of
construction as the fundamental unit of
grammatical representation (Fillmore et al. 1988
Goldberg 1995 4 Croft 2001 17-19 Goldberg
2003 219) - The usage-based model frequency and lexical
storage (Bybee 1995, 2001 Bybee and Scheibman
1999 Barlow and Kemmer 2000)
10Methodology
- Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese
(ver 4.0)http//www.sinica.edu.tw/SinicaCorpus/ - Search for lian as a connective 1191 tokens
- Manually tag the components between lian and
dou/ye with syntactic categories
11Evidence for constructional status (1)
- Native speakers and researchers intuition
- More tangible proof usage-based model
- Filter 1191 lian tokens for collocation with dou
and/or ye - 1076 in total (90.34)
12Evidence for constructional status (2)
- Further proofSyntactic properties are not
predictable from its components - Statistically minority in a primarily SVO
language (Sun and Givón 1994 164 Huang and Chui
1997 57)
13Internal structure (1)
- Components of lian X dou Y and lian X ye Y
X -gt focalized elementY -gt whatever follows
dou/ye - Focalized element (X)
- 1) transitive subject (A) e.g. (1)
- 2) transitive object (O) e.g. (2)
- 3) intransitive subject (S) e.g. (3)
- 4) bare verb (V) e.g. (4)
- 5) clause (C) e.g. (5), (6), (7)
14Internal structure (2)
- Whatever follows dou/ye (Y)
- mainly a verbal/shi predicate, occasionally
with a PP
15Split preference in focalization (1)
16Split preference in focalization (2)
- lian X dou Y focalize Olian X ye Y
focalize S - Further proofpreverbal objects in Mandarin are
atypical and carry emphatic functions (Light
1979 Tang 1988 171 Sun and Givón 1994 164
Huang and Chui 1997 57) - Serve different communicative needs
17Explaining the split preference (1)
- Dou all universal quantification and
distributivity (Hou 1979 Lee 1986 Y.-H. Li
1992 F.-H. Liu 1990 Cheng 1995 J. Li 1995) - Tendency to a plural nominal due to its
distributive nature (F.-H. Liu 1990 Jiang 1998
Fang and Fan 2002 Zhang 2002)
18Explaining the split preference (2)
- Ye also association/resemblance
- Tendency to introduce single referents
- Du Bois (1987, 2003a, 2003b)A gt old
informationO gt locus of new informationS gt
primarily old information, though compatible with
new information - -gt explains why A doesnt figure prominently
in either construction
19Explaining the split preference (3)
- Old information mostly involve singular
referents, whereas new information is more likely
to involve plural referents - -gt explains the split preference!
20Topic-comment structure
- Y is obligatorily a verbal predicate, even when X
is V, e.g. (4), (5), (6) - Further proofRepetition of anaphora, e.g. (8),
(9) - Supports Tsao (1994)
21Constructional configuration
- Topic-comment structure suggests a structural
boundary - lian X dou Y lian X ye Y
- ?
?lian X dou Y lian X ye Y - ? ?
- lian X dou Y lian X ye Y
22Challenges for the constructionist approaches
- X as NP?? Y as VP??
- Topic-comment structure
- Split preference distinguishing both
constructions gradient, not constant - -gt Preferred Argument Structure (Du Bois
2003a)
23Suggested solutions
- Indeterminate constructionsunderspecified
components filled in by discourse-pragmatics - Recognize gradient properties in constructions
(but how to formalize??)
24Conclusion
- Split preference in focalization between lian X
dou Y and lian X ye Y - Discourse profiles of synonymous constructions
- Challenges to the constructionist approaches and
suggested solutions
25Questions??
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