The Prosody and Morphology of Elastic Words in Chinese:Annotations and Analyses.

word length;prosody;morphology;Chinese lexicon;homophone avoidance;Linguistics;Humanities;Linguistics

Dong, YanFeng, Shengli ;

University of Michigan

关键词: word length;    prosody;    morphology;    Chinese lexicon;    homophone avoidance;    Linguistics;    Humanities;    Linguistics;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/116629/yandong_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

Elastic words are those whose length can vary between monosyllabic and disyllabic, without changing the meaning. Though elastic words have known to be many in Chinese, it is still not clear how many words are elastic. In addition, there is no consensus on the motivation of creating elastic words. This dissertation offers a complete annotation of elastic words in modern Standard Chinese and sample annotations of Middle Chinese, and investigates why elastic words are created. Specifically, it examines four properties of elastic words focusing on the homophone-avoidance theory and the prosody theory. The former, by far the most popular one, proposes that disyllabic words are created to reduce homophony and avoid ambiguity after massive syllable loss. In contrast, the prosody theory proposes that elastic words are created because disyllabic words are needed in prosodically strong positions, due to the requirement of Foot Binarity.First, a study examines the relation between homophony and elastic words, based on a complete length elasticity annotation of Modern Chinese Dictionary (2005). Results show that there is no correlation between homophony and elastic words. The second study examines the effect of word category on elastic words in modern Standard Chinese. Results show that (i) half of words in Chinese lexicon are elastic; (ii) content words have higher percentage of elastic words than function words. The third study examines the historical development of elastic words, with a focus on Middle Chinese, especially Tang poems. Results show that there are many elastic words in Middle Chinese, similar to that in Modern Chinese. The fourth study examines word length in Chinese dialects, focusing on Mandarin and Cantonese. Results show that they have similar percentages of disyllabic words and that the size of syllable inventory has no effect on word length.Various evidence consistently points to the conclusion that the prosody theory offers a better explanation of why elastic words are created in Chinese, despite of the fact that the homophone-avoidance theory seems quite intuitive and natural. In other words, elastic words are created to fulfill prosodic requirement rather than to compensate for syllable loss or an increase in homophony.