Part of the Institute for Chinese Studies "Understanding China -- Its Roots and New Frontiers" Lecture Series
“Words and Morphemes in Chinese and English”
Abstract:
Chinese and English are the two largest languages in the world, no doubt in terms of speaker population and possibly in terms of vocabulary size. Chinese and English are also typologically unrelated. Therefore, any similarities we can find between them may shed light on common properties across languages.
Some similarities can be observed easily. For example, both languages have words that have elastic length (i.e. one short and one long), such as prof-professor and dog-doggy in English, and ri-riben 日-日本 ‘Japan’ and ya-yazi 鸭-鸭子 ‘duck’ in Chinese. Similarly, both languages have words that can be a verb or a noun, such as study in English and xuexi 学习 ‘study’ in Chinese. Moreover, both languages show preferences for certain word orders, based on the length of the words. For example, in English we find bells and whistles (not whistles and bells), and meat and potatoes (not potatoes and meat). In Chinese we find reai renmin reai dang 热爱人民热爱党 ‘love people love party’ (not热爱党热爱人民), but ai dang ai renmin 爱党爱人民 ‘love party love people’ (not爱人民爱党).
Some comparisons are less obvious and require in-depth research. For example, how many morphemes are there in Chinese? How many are there in English? What are the POS (part-of-speech) distributions in Chinese and English? How many Chinese words have elastic length? How many words have elastic length in English?
San Duanmu will report on his recent research that has yielded new empirical data. He will also show that the empirical data not only help explain similarities and differences between Chinese and English but raise new theoretical questions.
Biography:
San Duanmu is Professor of Linguistics, University of Michigan. He received his PhD in Linguis tics from MIT in 1990 and has held teaching posts at Fudan University, Shanghai (1981-1986) and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1991-present). His research focuses on general properties across languages, especially those in phonology.
Co-sponsors: Graduate Association of Chinese Linguistics (GACL) and Department of Linguistics
