Using Phylogenetic Networks to Model Chinese Dialect History

The idea that language history is best visualized by a branching tree has been controversially discussed in the linguistic world and many alternative theories have been proposed. The reluctance of many scholars to accept the tree as the natural metaphor for language history was due to conflicting signals in linguistic data: many resemblances would simply not point to a unique tree. Despite these observations, the majority of automatic approaches applied to language data has been based on the tree model, while network approaches have rarely been applied. Due to the specific sociolinguistic situation in China, where very divergent varieties have been developing under the roof of a common culture and writing system, the history of the Chinese dialects is complex and intertwined. They are therefore a good test case for methods which no longer take the family tree as their primary model. Here we use a network approach to study the lexical history of 40 Chinese dialects. In contrast to previous approaches, our method is character-based and captures both vertical and horizontal aspects of language history. According to our results, the majority of characters in our data (about 54%) cannot be readily explained with the help of a given tree model. The borrowing events inferred by our method do not only reflect general uncertainties of Chinese dialect classification, they also reveal the strong influence of the standard language on Chinese dialect history.

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Pitch or Phonation: on the Glottalization in Tone Productions in the Ruokeng Hui Chinese Dialect

10.21437/interspeech.2018-1638 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Minghui Zhang ◽

Fang Hu

Keyword(s):

Chinese Dialect

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Typological shift in lexicalizing motion events: The case of Wenzhou

Linguistic Typology ◽

10.1515/lingty-2020-5002 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 0 (0) ◽

Author(s):

Jingxia Lin

Keyword(s):

The Other ◽

Head Motion ◽

Motion Events ◽

Other Hand ◽

Chinese Dialect ◽

Chinese Dialects ◽

Motion Verb ◽

The One ◽

Over Time ◽

Modern Standard

AbstractTypological shift in lexicalizing motion events has hitherto been observed cross-linguistically. While over time, Chinese has shown a shift from a dominantly verb-framed language in Old Chinese to a strongly satellite-framed language in Modern Standard Mandarin, this study presents the Chinese dialect Wenzhou, which has taken a step further than Standard Mandarin and other Chinese dialects in becoming a thoroughly satellite-framed language. On the one hand, Wenzhou strongly disfavors the verb-framed pattern. Wenzhou not only has no prototypical path verbs, but also its path satellites are highly deverbalized. On the other hand, Wenzhou strongly prefers the satellite-framed pattern, to the extent that it very frequently adopts a neutral motion verb to head motion expressions so that path can be expressed via satellites and the satellite-framed pattern can be syntactically maintained. The findings of this study are of interest to intra-linguistic, diachronic and cross-linguistic studies of the variation in encoding motion events.

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