scholarly journals Social changes through the lens of language: A big data study of Chinese modal verbs

PLoS ONE ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. e0260210
Author(s):  
Shan Wang ◽  
Ruhan Liu ◽  
Chu-Ren Huang
Keyword(s):  
Sampling Design ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Modal Verbs ◽  
New Culture Movement ◽  
Corpus Size ◽  
Steep Decline ◽  
Chinese Writing System ◽  
Point To Point ◽  
Chinese Writing

Leech’s corpus-based comparison of English modal verbs from 1961 to 1992 showed the steep decline of all modal verbs together, which he ascribed to continuing changes towards a more equal and less authority-driven society. This study inspired many diachronic and synchronic studies, mostly on English modal verbs and largely assuming the correlation between the use of modal verbs and power relations. Yet, there are continuing debates on sampling design and the choices of corpora. In addition, this hypothesis has not been attested in any other language with comparable corpus size or examined with longitudinal studies. This study tracks the use of Chinese modal verbs from 1901 to 2009, covering the historical events of the New Culture Movement, the establishment of the PRC, the implementation of simplified characters and the completion and finalization of simplification of the Chinese writing system. We found that the usage of modal verbs did rise and fall during the last century, and for more complex reasons. We also demonstrated that our longitudinal end-to-end approach produces convincing analysis on English modal verbs that reconciles conflicting results in the literature adopting Leech’s point-to-point approach.

scholarly journals Neurocognitive Basis of Dyslexia in Different Writing Systems

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Li Liu ◽  
James R. Booth
Keyword(s):  
Developmental Dyslexia ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Writing Systems ◽  
Neural Basis ◽  
Chinese Writing System ◽  
Chinese Writing ◽  
Alphabetic Writing

An important issue in dyslexia research is whether developmental dyslexia in different writing systems has a common neurocognitive basis across writing systems or whether there are specific neurocognitive alterations. In this chapter, we review studies that investigate the neurocognitive basis of dyslexia in Chinese, a logographic writing system, and compare the findings of these studies with dyslexia in alphabetic writing systems. We begin with a brief review of the characteristics of the Chinese writing system because to fully understand the commonality and specificity in the neural basis of Chinese dyslexia one must understand how logographic writing systems are structured differently than alphabetic systems.

scholarly journals On Sino-Turkic, a First Glance (北俗初探)

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 436-476
Author(s):  
An-King Lim ◽  
林安 慶
Keyword(s):  
Relative Clause ◽  
National Language ◽  
List Type ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Free Relative ◽  
Chinese Writing System ◽  
Chinese Writing

When Turkic-speaking Tabghatch conquered China in 386 ce and ruled her for nearly 200 years, they, being minority rulers, elected to take up Chinese writing system and language as the official means of communication with its subject population. They also ended up adopting the writing system to script the Turkic language for their Turkic population resulting into a Xianbei National Language (xnl). This work describes 7 cases of Turkic-rooted Sinitic functional expressions, all featuring the word 的 [d-], supported with historical citations in Chinese documents, believed to be cultural continua of the xnl: 1) The constative preterite -dI, -dXŋ → the constative 的 [də], 底 [di], 端 [duan] 2) The nominalizer -dOk+ in free relative clause → Sinitc 的 [də], 底 [di], 得 [də] in free relative clause 3) The nominalizer -dOk+ in bound relative clause → Sinitic 底 [di], 的 [də] in bound relative clause 4) The adverb of manner suffix +tI/+dI → the adverb of manner suffixes 地 [di], 底 [di], 的 [də] 5) The locative-ablative case suffixes +dA/+tA → the locative suffixes 底 [di], 頭 [tou], 的 [də] 6) The perfect participle -dOk → the perfect participles 得 [də], 的 [di] 7) The completive perfect formative ïd- → the completive perfect formatives 得 [də], 的 [di]

A typology of readings of Chinese characters in traditional Zhuang manuscripts

2009 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
David HOLM ◽  
David HOLM
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Character ◽  
Southern China ◽  
Chinese Characters ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Writing Systems ◽  
Chinese Writing System ◽  
Standard Chinese ◽  
Chinese Writing

The Old Zhuang Script is an instance of a borrowed Chinese character script. Zhuang is the current designation for the northern and central Tai languages spoken in Guangxi in southern China. On the basis of a corpus of traditional texts, as recited by traditional owners, this article presents a typology of Zhuang readings of the standard Chinese characters in these texts. While some categories represent phonetic or semantic readings of Chinese characters, others correspond neither semantically nor phonetically to Chinese graphs, and often involve serial borrowing. The implications of this typology for the study of writing systems, and the Chinese writing system in particular, would seem to be considerable.

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