Grammatical Constraints on Compound Abbreviation in Taiwan Mandarin

Abstract

Abbreviation of forms which have already been understood, or which can be expected to be understood, is probably a language universal, owing to the economic motivation of linguistic formation. In Taiwan Mandarin, we find a phenomenon of word abbreviation that ”usually takes the form of a selection of a few key morphemes from a long string of morphemes” (Chao, 1968: 492), e.g., huanjing baohu → huanbao 'environmental protection'. Abbreviation is particularly interesting from the theoretical angle of how ”key morphemes” are selected. To investigate the issue of why one morpheme is favored over another in the abbreviation process in Taiwan Mandarin, an experiment was designed to determine the main constraint in selection of key morphemes. Two grammatical constraints, one morphological and one semantic, are proposed and shown to compete in constraining the selection of the morphemes. The morphological constraint states that the selected morpheme in Abbreviation is the leftmost element, that is, the morphological head 1 or 3 in a compound word of form〔〔1-2〕〔3-4〕〕(cf. Huang, 1988). On the other hand, the semantic entailment constraint states that in deciding which element should be taken, the subject selects the element which has the semantic meaning entailing those of the unselected morpheme. A general pattern has emerged in which the morphologica1 constraint dominates the subjects' choice of a morpheme for an abbreviated form unless competing secondary constraints, such as the semantic entailment constraint examined in this study, interfere and cause a shift in selection preference from the left to the right morpheme.