Colloquial Chinese Research Articles

Rhythmical Features of Spontaneous Spoken Narrative in Mandarin Chinese

Every oral communication is shaped by a series of closely linked factors and rhythm is one of them. The rhythmical flow in colloquial Mandarin Chinese was thoroughly described by the Czech phonetician Oldřich Švarný, who invented a unique notation system dedicated to facilitating the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language. His prosodic transcription parses speech into a two-level arrangement of prosodic units. It displays the speech rhythm as an alternation of rhythmically significant and insignificant syllables of unequal tone prominence. The paper contributes to Švarný’s findings by shifting the attention from prefabricated teaching materials to an example of unrehearsed dynamic speech. Specifically, it attempts to outline the basic rhythmical features of personal narrative and confront them with the current understanding of speech rhythm in colloquial Chinese. It also demonstrates how Švarný’s methodological framework can be exploited to investigate different types of spoken discourse.

A Pragmatic Approach to the Composition, Types, Functions and Interpretations of Chinese-specific Curse Guo Ma “<i>ta ma de</i>” and Its Variants

Guo Ma (Chinese-specific cursing terms) is a type of scolding expressions widely spread in colloquial Chinese, expressing such emotion as dislike, grudge, indignation. Searching the internet reveals that, while there are many comments and essays about this kind of words, a theoretically systematical discussion of their construction, pragmatic and textual function is rare. This paper, based on corpus observation and questionnaire analysis, aims at exploring the composition, types, functions and pragmatic forces of Chinese-specific cursing terms ta ma de and its variants. It is revealed that: (1) There are eight main types of Chinese-specific cursing words in ta ma de and its variants; (2) These cursing terms under observation convey not only negative attitude and emotion as traditionally recognized but also neutral or even positive attitude and emotion; (3) Chinese national curse ta ma de and its variants are phrases used not only to perform the pragmatic function of swearing but also play a grammatical cognitive function. The researchers do not intend to offer a deliberate justification for these terms but show that they are not diabolic expressions and deserve a full attention of linguists.

명말(明末) 소설 『요해단충록』(遼海丹忠錄)과 사르후 전투

This article analyzes the Chinese novel, Liaohai Danzhong Lu (遼海丹忠錄), written in the early 17 century, focusing on the episodes related to the Battle of Sarhū. This novel is consisted of 40 chapters in 8 volumes as a novel of colloquial Chinese, supposed to be written by Lu renlong (陸人龍), who is well-known as the writer in late Ming China. It was about a life story of Mao Wenlong who was military commander, and deals with an incident that occurred in the Liaodong region.<BR> Although Liaohai Danzhong Lu is a novel, it contains many characters who actually existed in history, and this story is based on actual incidents. This article contrasts the descriptions of the Battle of Sarhü, which marked a watershed in the history of Northeast Asia, with the actual historical records of Manju Shilu (滿洲實錄).<BR> The description of Liaohai Danzhong Lu is mostly consistent with historical facts except for some errors. Of course, it is not clear exactly what data the author used to write this novel. However, as a result of contrast with official state documents such as Manju Shilu, the critical disagreement in narrative is not prominent. This will prove that Liaohai Danzhong Lu is not just fiction, but rather works based on materials with some credibility. Therefore, Liaohai Danzhong Lu is a novel that needs to be analyzed in relation to the history of Northeast Asia in the 17 century, and in this sense, analysis by historians as well as literature researchers is necessary.

An Empirical Study of Translational and Stationary Motion Events in Chinese

Studies on the place of Mandarin Chinese in Motion event typology present three different views: Chinese is a satellite-framed, a verb-framed, or an equipollently-framed language. The purpose of this research is to further investigate the typological status of Chinese and to figure out the proportion of the so-called serial verb construction by analyzing the descriptive data of translational and stationary Motion events. This study has analyzed 530 Motion event clauses from 71 video reports of natural disasters occurring frequently and pervasively in daily life. The study results show that Path components are frequently conflated in the main Path verbs in modern colloquial Chinese and the frequency of the so-called serial verb construction is quite limited. Based on these findings, it is proposed that Chinese behaves more similarly to a verb-framed language rather than to either a satellite-framed or an equipollently-framed language.

중국어 전환관계 접속어의 구어 중 사용 양상에 관한 연구 - ‘但是’, ‘可是’, ‘不過’를 중심으로 -

중국어 전환관계 접속어의 구어 중 사용 양상에 관한 연구 - ‘但是’, ‘可是’, ‘不過’를 중심으로 -

Shén (神) in Modern Chinese

Abstract In modern Chinese, a new degree adverb shén 神 is emerging. Expressions such as shénhăochī 神好吃 and shényǒuqù 神有趣 are found in colloquial Chinese, and they even appear as headlines to get readers’ attention. Shén originally refers to the dominator and creator of the universe. In modern Chinese, along with the original meaning, people frequently use shén to modify things (e.g., shén jīyīn 神基因) or actions (e.g., shén huí 神回). How many senses does shén have? How did shén derive the use of degree adverb? The paper targets on shén in modern Chinese, aiming to study its senses, to work out the relations among the various usages, and to find out how it generated the use of degree adverb. The conclusion shows that the senses of shén were derived from its original meaning either directly or indirectly through reanalysis, inference, metaphorization, and metonymization. The use of degree adverb was generated through metaphorization and reanalysis.

Review of Jiang Wu, "Leaving for the Rising Sun: Chinese Zen Master Yinyuan &amp; the Authenticity Crisis in Early Modern East Asia

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Jiang Wu, Leaving for Rising Sun: Chinese Zen Master Yinyuan & in Early Modern East Asia Oxford New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 384 pages. Hardcover, $105.00; paperback, $36.95. isbn 9780199393121 (hardcover); 9780199393138 (paperback).THE NARRATIVE set forth in Leaving for Rising Sun is ambitious comprehensive with breadth of methodological analysis depth derived from meticulous archival research. It cover events leading up to arrival of Chinese Chan master Yinyuan Longqi ... (Jp. Ingen Ryuki, 1592-1673) in Japan in 1645; establishment of Manpukuji ... in Uji, as head monastery of new, Japanese Zen tradition, Obakushu ... via temples in Nagasaki serving Chinese immigrants, many from Fuqing county ... in Fujian province ... in 1661; influence eleven Chinese abbots exerted in Edo-era (1603-1868) Japan until 1740 or 1768. In several respects, Leaving for Rising Sun is follow-up volume to Wu (2008), research in both monographs is derived from Jiang Wu's 2002 PhD dissertation. The title, Leaving for Rising Sun, is somewhat misleading because, strictly speaking, only two chapters out of seven, plus dynamic introduction thoughtprovoking conclusion, concern life, times, impact of Yinyuan Longqi in China before he left to embark upon legendary career in Japan. The main goals of this are: 1. to investigate Yinyuan and delineate contour of his Zen mission in context of early modern Sino-Japanese history; 2. to place Yinyuan's Zen mission within multiple religious, political, cultural contexts as spiritual leader, political representative, writer of belles lettres (243); 3. to demonstrate that a complete subversion of China-centered world-view only happened after both countries were challenged by intrusion of Western powers, even if the seed of changes was already planted in early modern time (266-76).What separates Leaving for Rising Sun from Japanese secondary studies of history of Zen Buddhism (for example, Ibuki 2001) Helen Baroni's two excellent books (2000; 2006) on subject of Obaku Zen Buddhism Tetsugen Doko ... (1630-1682) is expressed in subtitle: Chinese Zen Master Yinyuan & in Early Modern East Asia. Rather than emphasizing significance of converts or disciples who promoted novel Obakushu practices in Japan-recitation of buddha Amitabha's name (nembutsu ...), southeastern Chinese, Ming-style pronunciation of scriptures spells during regulated recitation regimen (Minchofu bonbai ...), even vegetarian diet (fucha ryori ...) or drink (sencha ...) at Manpukuji or other Obakushu temples-this focuses on Chinese abbots.Between 1661 1740, eleven Chinese abbots of Manpukuji were welcomed by bakufu twenty-one times at Edo castle. At least one intellectual, Ogyu Sorai ... (1666-1728), was delighted to practice his colloquial Chinese (3-5) with these individuals. Yinyuan Longqi his Chinese disciples, therefore, influenced both Edo-era Japanese Zen Buddhist monastics with their claim to have conveyed to Japan authentic transmission of Rinzai Zen Buddhism-through publication of Feyin Tongrong's ... (Jp. Hiin Tsuyo, 1593-1661) Strict Transmission of Five Chan Lamps (Ch. Wudengyantong; Jp. Goto gento ...) in Japan in 1657- and, perhaps more significantly, because Yinyuan Chinese abbots of Manpukuji stimulated intellectuals to attentively engage with what Benjamin Elman has called an East Asian community of textual scholars who specialized in empirical research philological studies of Chinese classics (2008)-connected through Nagasaki trade or what Wang Yong (1999) calls book road-to respond to Authenticity Crisis that challenged classical Chinese notions of universal discourse, which still sets center (China) apart from periphery (so-called barbarians). …

Phonological Features of Yuan Colloquial Chinese as Seen in Rashid al-Din's History of China

Rashid al-Din (1247-1318)'s History of China, written in Persian, contains the names of the dynasties, and of kings and emperors, from prehistoric legends up to the Yuan dynasty. The phonetic transcription of these proper names is an important piece of information for us to understand the Chinese phonology of the Yuan dynasty. in order to correctly understand the phonological features of old Mandarin the possible phonological contrasts that can be represented in the Persian script are examined. it is shown that the Persian transcriptions did not create new letters for Chinese sounds. Thus all the phonological categories of Chinese are only represented by the available Persian letters. After analyzing these transcriptions, this article shows that although many phonological distinctions of old Mandarin are not very well represented in this material, there are enough phonological features to identify the underlying phonological system, which is unambiguously Mandarin.

Literary and Colloquial Readings in Shanghai Dialect

This article is based on contemporary Shanghai dialect. In order to discuss the literary and colloquial readings of initials and rhymes in Shanghai dialect, we examine a large body of evidence, including A Grammar of Colloquial Chinese, as Exhibited in the Shanghai Dialect by Joseph Edkins, research on Chinese phonology by Bernhard Karlgren and so on. The article is mainly concerned with the following contrasts: -o / -ᴀ, -ᴀ / -ᴇ, -o / -uᴀ, -ã / -ǝŋ, - / -ã, ȵ- / z- or l- or ɦ-, m- / v- or Ø-, ŋ- or ȵ- / ɦ- or Ø-, k- / ʨi- etc. Through competition among the literary and colloquial readings, we look for clues to historical developments.

Validity and cultural equivalence of the standard Greene Climacteric Scale in Hong Kong

The aim of this study was to translate the standard Greene Climacteric Scale (GCS) and a urogenital symptom scale into colloquial Chinese (Hong Kong) and test their validity and reliability in Hong Kong Chinese women. The scales were translated with standard techniques, and cross-cultural construct validity, internal consistency, test-retest reliability, and responsiveness were tested on samples of women aged 40 to 60 years recruited from the community. A total of 611 women, with mean (SD) age of 48.9 (5.3) years, provided completed scales for the study. Confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated construct validity of the translated standard GCS. The items were found to have good homogeneity in measuring the scale concepts (Cronbach alpha > 0.7). But the three-item urogenital scale had poor internal consistency (Cronbach alpha = 0.43), and a combination of this scale with the standard GCS resulted in a reduced model fit to the data. Test-retest reliability for the GCS was good on women recruited for a retest (n = 52). The translated GCS was found to be responsive to change over time (effect size, 0.59; n = 19). The Chinese (Hong Kong) version of the standard GCS is a valid and cultural-equivalent instrument. Our data do not support inclusion of the urogenital scale to the standard GCS. Measurement of urogenital symptoms is subject to further study.

Dislocation focus construction in Chinese

The use of the Dislocation Focus Construction (DFC) (also known as “Right Dislocation”) in colloquial Chinese (including Cantonese and Mandarin) gives rise to various non-canonical word orders. In DFCs, the sentence particle (SP) occurs in a sentence-medial position. The pre- and post-SP materials are demonstrated to be syntactically connected, based on four diagnostic tests, namely (i) the zinghai ‘only’ test, (ii) the doudai (“wh-the-hell”) test, (iii) polarity item licensing, and (iv) Principle C violations. The findings offer new insights into the syntax of the Chinese left periphery and constraints on focus movement. First, the observations entail that Chinese CPs are head-initial, and an XP is obligatorily moved around the SP to a position higher than the CP. Second, the XP-raising in the DFC is argued to be driven by focus because of the focus interpretation induced. It is discovered that the focus movement is subject to the Spine Constraint, which turns out to be remarkably similar to the properties of the Nuclear Stress Rule (e.g., selection of focus set and metrical invisibility). It is argued that the DFC is the syntactic realization of the rule.

Unsupervised Learning of a Chinese Spontaneous and Colloquial Speech Lexicon with Content and Filler Phrase Classification

There is significant lexical difference—words and usage of words-between spontaneous/colloquial language and the written language. This difference affects the performance of spoken language recognition systems that use statistical language models or context-free-grammars because these models are based on the written language rather than the spoken form. There are many filler phrases and colloquial phrases that appear solely or more often in spontaneous and colloquial speech. Chinese languages perhaps exemplify such a difference as many colloquial forms of the language, such as Cantonese, exist strictly in spoken forms and are different from the written standard Chinese, which is based on Mandarin. A conventional way of dealing with this issue is to add colloquial terms manually to the lexicon. However, this is time-consuming and expensive. Meanwhile, supervised learning requires manual tagging of large corpuses, which is also time-consuming. We propose an unsupervised learning method to find colloquial terms and classify filler and content phrases in spontaneous and colloquial Chinese, including Cantonese. We propose using frequency strength, and spread measures of character pairs and groups to extract automatically frequent, out-of-vocabulary colloquial terms to add to a standard Chinese lexicon. An unsegmented, and unannotated corpus is segmented with the augmented lexicon. We then propose a Markov classifier to classify Chinese characters into either content or filler phrases in an iterative training method. This method is task-independent and can extract even mixed language terms. We show the effectiveness of our method by both a natural language query processing task and an adaptive Cantonese language-modeling task. The precision for content phrase extraction and classification is around 80%, with a recall of 99%, and the precision for filler phrase extraction and classification is around 99.5% with a recall of approximately 89%. The web search precision using these extracted content words is comparable to that of the search results with content phrases selected by humans. We adapt a language model trained from written texts with the Hong Kong Newsgroup corpus. It outperforms both the standard Chinese language model and also the Cantonese language model. It also performs better than the language model trained a simply by concatenating two sets of standard and colloquial texts.

Colloquial Chinese

Colloquial Chinese

Colloquial Chinese. By Ping-cheng T'ung and D. E. Polllard. (Colloquial Series.) pp. vi, 322 + cassette. London, etc., Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982. £4.95 + £6.90 (incl. VAT) cassette. - Character Text for P. C. T'ung and D. E. Pollard, Colloquial Chinese. Full-form character version. By Ping-cheng T'ung. pp. [iii], 198. [London, Ping-cheng T'ung, [C1982].] (Obtainable from Probsthain. £7.50.)

Colloquial Chinese. By Ping-cheng T'ung and D. E. Polllard. (Colloquial Series.) pp. vi, 322 + cassette. London, etc., Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982. £4.95 + £6.90 (incl. VAT) cassette. - Character Text for P. C. T'ung and D. E. Pollard, Colloquial Chinese. Full-form character version. By Ping-cheng T'ung. pp. [iii], 198. [London, Ping-cheng T'ung, [^C1982].] (Obtainable from Probsthain. £7.50.)

A Semantic Analysis of Some Kinship Names in Modern Colloquial Chinese

Geoffrey Leech の“Semantics”を参考にして, 現代漢語の常用親属呼称語を意義素分析法によって分析する。まず, 最も基本的な語である“丈夫”と“妻子”については,“丈夫”:+(近親属性)↔(配偶関係)+(男性)“妻子”:+(近親属性)↔(配偶関係)-(男性)と図式化される。同様に,“父親”,“母親”,“儿子”,“女儿”,“哥哥”,“弟弟”,“姐姐”,“妹妹”についても分析を試みる。このほか,“祖父”すなわち“‘父親’の‘父親’”のごとき二層構造をなすもの,“伯母”すなわち“‘父親’の‘哥哥’の‘妻子’”のごとき三層構造をなすものがあることを分析した上で, それらの関係を考えてみた。

ON THE STATISTICAL RELATION BETWEEN THE SYLLABLE ARTICULATION AND THE PHONEME ARTICULATION

The internal information, i.e. the syllable formation rule, of the language plays an important role in the statistical relation between the syllable articulation and the phoneme articulation, especially when the articulation scores are low. This is taken account in deriving an expression for the relation between the syllable articulation and the phoneme articulation scores, which agrees well with the experimental results of standard colloquial Chinese and accounts for the differences between theory and experiment for English and Japanese by previous authors.

Acoustical Features and Perceptual Cues of the Four Tones of Standard Colloquial Chinese

Monosyllabic, bisyllabic, and trisyllabic words of various phonemic constitutions were spoken with the four tones of standard colloqual Chinese by three speakers, two male and a female, born in Formosa, and the typical pitch patterns of the four tones for each speaker were extracted from these speech samples. Effects of the position of the syllable and the context of the kind of tone in a word on the average pitch frequency, range of change in pitch frequency, and duration of the typical pitch patterns were also analyzed. Then, the listening test was conducted to identify the kind of tone of the speech samples, and perceptual cues of the four tones were investigated through the confusion among tones, which was characteristic of each of native and nonnative listeners groups and each of nonsense and meaningful words groups. Based on the results of the acoustical analysis and the listening test, a set of essential features of the four tones were derived, and a generative model of pitch pattern of the tone accent was proposed. The results were examined utilizing listening test with the synthetic speech generated by the model. Effect of intensity pattern on the tone accent was also discussed.

A Course of Colloquial Chinese.

A Course of Colloquial Chinese.

A Course of Colloquial Chinese. Book I

A Course of Colloquial Chinese. Book I