Canadian Social Science
A Contrastive Study of English and Chinese Synthetic Compounds
Abstract
The current research compares the distributions of OV/VO patterns in English and Chinese synthetic compounds in a quantitative way and attempts to explain the mechanisms of the two patterns of compounds in English and Chinese. Both English and Chinese adopt SVO as their basic word order. However, the interface of syntax and morphology is more clear-cut in English than in Chinese. VO order prevails in English syntax. But VO order must be transformed into OV order in morphology. VO order is quite unproductive in English morphology. Compared with English, the boundary between morphology and syntax is rather vague in Chinese. The formation of Chinese compounds could be explained by the theory of “syntax-as-morphology”, i.e., the VO order of syntax is directly copied by morphology in Chinese. The mechanism of Chinese synthetic compounds provides evidence for the hypothesis of “syntax as morphology”.
Keywords
Full Text:
PDFReferences
Academia Sinica Ancient Chinese Corpus. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://lingcorpus.iis.sinica.edu.tw/cgi-bin/kiwi/akiwi/kiwi.sh?ukey=-587415549&qtype=-1
Adams, V. (1973). An introduction to modern English word-formation. London: Longman,.
Caballero, G., Houser, M. J., Marcus, N., McFarland, T., Pycha, A., Toosarvandani, M.,…Nichols, J. (2008). Nonsyntactic ordering effects in noun incorporation. Linguistic Typology, 12(3), 383-421.
Ceccagno, A. (2009). Metacompounds in Chinese. Lingue e linguaggio, VIII(2), 195-212.
Chao,Y. R. (1968). A Grammar of Spoken Chinese. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Cheng, G. (2005). Zhe (er) synthetic compounds in Chinese and their implications for UG. Modern Foreign Languages, (3), 232-238.
Croft, W., & Deligianni, E. (2001). Asymmetries in NP word order. University of Manchester.
Feng, S. L. (1999). Interactions between Morphology Syntax and Prosody in Chinese. Beijing: Peking University Press.
Feng, S. L. (2004). Verb-object inversion and prosodic morphology. Linguistic Sciences, (3), 12-20.
Givón, T. (1971). Historical syntax and synchronic morphology: an archaeologist’s field trip. Chicago Linguistic Society, 7, 394-415.
Harley, H. D. (2009). Compounding in distributed morphology. In L. Rochelle & P. Štekauer (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of compounding (pp.129-144). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
He, Y. J. (2004). The loop theory in Chinese morphology. Contemporary Linguistics, (3), 223-235.
He, Y. J. (2013). A further study on Chinese synthetic compounds: Structure, typology and cues to language acquisition. Foreign Language Teaching and Research, 45(4), 483-494.
Jerome L. P. (2000). The Morphology of Chinese: A Linguistic and Cognitive Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kayne, R. S. (1994). The antisymmetry of syntax. linguistic inquiry monograph twenty-five. MIT Press.
Lehmann, W. P. (1974). Proto-Indo-European syntax. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Li, C. N., & Thompson, S. A. (1981). Mandarin Chinese: A functional reference grammar. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lieber，R., & Štekauer, P. (2009). Introduction: status and definition of compounding. In L. Rochelle & P. Štekauer (Eds.). The Oxford handbook of compounding. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3-18.
Liu, X. L., Wang, W. B., Tan, R. S., & Chen, W. B. (2015). A contrastive study of the English and Chinese word order from the perspective of historical linguistics. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press.
Mayor, M., & Yang, X. Z. (2005). MacMillan English-Chinese dictionary for advanced learners. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press.
Scalise, S., & Bisetto, A. (2009). The classification of compounds. In L. Rochelle & P. Štekauer (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Compounding (pp.34-53). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Shi, C. Z. (1986). Outline of Chinese grammar history (hanyu yufashi gangyao). Shanghai: East China Normal University Press.
Wang, L. (1980). A history of Chinese (hanyu shigao). Beijing: The Commercial Press.
Zhuang, H. B., & Liu, Z. Q. (2011). Morphology of Chinese synthetic compounds and their prosodic constraint. Chinese Teaching in the World, (4), 497-506.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/10375
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
Copyright (c) 2018 Canadian Social Science
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Reminder
- How to do online submission to another Journal?
- If you have already registered in Journal A, then how can you submit another article to Journal B? It takes two steps to make it happen:
Submission Guidelines for Canadian Social Science
We are currently accepting submissions via email only. The registration and online submission functions have been disabled.
Please send your manuscripts to css@cscanada.net，or css@cscanada.org for consideration. We look forward to receiving your work.
Articles published in Canadian Social Science are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY).
Canadian Social Science Editorial Office
Address: 1020 Bouvier Street, Suite 400, Quebec City, Quebec, G2K 0K9, Canada.
Telephone: 1-514-558 6138
Website: Http://www.cscanada.net; Http://www.cscanada.org
E-mail:caooc@hotmail.com; office@cscanada.net
Copyright © Canadian Academy of Oriental and Occidental Culture 
