Taxonomy of questions in TaiwanSouthern Min

Contra the conventional four-way distinction of syntactically-formed questions in Taiwan Southern Min (TSM): (i) yes-no, (ii) A-not-A, (iii) disjunctive, and (iv) wh-questions (e.g., Lau 2010a), we justify a more revealing dichotomy of confirmation-seeking (CS) polar questions and information-seeking (IS) constituent questions, based on a suite of semantic and syntactic tests proposed in extensive literature for Mandarin and adapted further for TSM, where A-not-A belongs to the disjunctive type, which is in turn a subcategory of IS constituent questions. Controversies over the proper status of some sentence-final question particles and kám questions are also deliberated. Dismissing some alleged polar question particles as polar or A-not-A tags, we recognize nih and honnh as interrogative polar particles. We also show that kám has two underlying forms. One is a portmanteau word of the modal kánn and the negator m̄ and thus forms a whether-or-not disjunctive question (Huang 1988a, 1991). However, when kám is short for kámkong ‘don’t tell me’, similar to the Mandarin nandao, it appears in a polar question.

Auditory startle disrupts speech coordination

Speech production requires temporal coordination between the actions of different functional groupings of muscles in the human body. Crucially, such functionally organized units, or “modules”, may be susceptible to disruption by an external stimulus such as a startling auditory stimulus (SAS; >120dB), enabling a possible window into the internal structure of learned speech movements. Following on the observation that SAS is known to accelerate the release of pre-planned actions, the current study examines lip kinematics in SAS-induced responses during speech movements to test whether this accelerated release applies on the scale of entire syllables or on the scale of smaller functional units. Production measures show that SAS-elicited bilabial movements in [ba] syllables are prone to disruption as measured by discontinuity in velocity profiles. We use a 3D finite element method (FEM) biomechanical model to simulate the temporal interaction between muscle groupings in speech. Simulation results indicate that this discontinuity can be accounted for as an instance of temporally decoupled coordination across neuromuscular modules. In such instances, the muscle groupings controlling lip compression and jaw opening, which normally fire sequentially, appear more likely to be activated synchronously.

A corpus-based study of directives in Taiwanese Southern Min

This study aims to examine the subtypes of directives and their realization patterns in Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM). The data were drawn from a play script corpus published in the 20th century. Nine directive subtypes were identified: advice, begging, invitation, order, offer, request, suggestion, urge, and warning. The realization patterns were analyzed in terms of the main components in the directives: alerter, discourse marker, politeness marker, subject, modal expression, verb phrase, and utterance final particle. The analysis reveals a number of features: (1) Alerters mainly take the form of an address term; (2) Utterance-initial discourse markers are mainly realized by tan ‘now’; (3) The subject is either hearer-dominated or speaker- and hearer-dominated, with the latter expressing solidarity in casual situations; (4) the politeness marker chhiáⁿ tends to take an overt subject; (5) The modal verb tio̍h accounts for the majority of subtypes; (6) The dominant verb types include dynamic, stative, uttering, and ingesting verbs; (7) Complex verb constructions mainly include directional verbs, disposal markers, and benefactive verbs; (8) Directional verbs are pervasive across all directives. A metaphorical transfer is operative in the use of directional verbs. Those marking an action toward the speaker (e.g., lâi ‘come’) are strongly associated with a positive attitude, while those expressing movement away from the speaker (e.g., khì ‘go’) are highly connected to an adversative mood. The omnipresence of [lâi V] suggests that it has been conventionalized as a default bundle to express politeness.

Reactivation of unaccusative and unergative verbs in Mandarin

Intransitives can be classified into two subclasses: unaccusative verbs and unergative verbs. According to the Unaccusative Hypothesis, the difference between unaccusatives and unergatives lies in where the single argument is generated in the underlying syntactic structure. Subjects of unaccusative verbs are base-generated in the object position and moved to the subject positions. Subjects of unergative verbs, however, are external and thus are not resulted from arguments moving from the object position. If the Unaccusative Hypothesis is correct, a trace is left at the original place for unaccusative verbs when movement occurs but no trace for unergative verbs. Friedmann et al. (2008) used the cross-modal lexical priming paradigm to examine the Unaccusative Hypothesis but their results could only lend limited support for the Unaccusative Hypothesis. Since the argument of Mandarin unaccusative verbs can occur preverbally and postverbally, it offers us a balanced testing ground to re-examine reactivation during sentence comprehension. Results of the current study lend support for the Unaccusative Hypothesis. When the argument occurred preverbally, a V-shaped line was observed. An inverted V-shaped line was observed when the argument occurred postverbally. For unergative verbs, the line showed a decay of reactivation.

From speech to language

This study proposes a novel exploration of perceived prosodic highlights in continuous speech, focusing on the alternative function of indexing and projecting information content deployment in the speech context. Given the assumption that prosodic highlight allocation directly reflects the interlocutors’ information content deployment, this study foregrounds perception-based prominences for indexing both the key information (KEY) and the projector (PJR) that projects the deployment of key/focal information. Two information content planning units (PJR plus its respective projection PJN, and KEY) prompted by prosodic highlights were established, based on quantitative analyses and discriminative acoustic features. Additional analyses confirm a general heavy-to-light information distribution across both units, showcasing that the relative projection trajectory size in the PJR-PJN unit is positively correlated to its position within discourse-prosodic units. Current results, therefore, directly substantiate the cognitive explanation of prosodic projection in speech, as evidence beyond syntactic relationships are drawn and prosodic projection is shown to involve perceived prosodic highlight allocation and information deployment in a fixed pattern. Explorations of prosody-prompted projection shed light on a more comprehensive account of the mechanism behind information planning, hence facilitating a deeper understanding of the composition of context prosody and the derivation of linguistic invariants from speech.

A corpus-based investigation of semantic and syntactic differences between the two major future tense constructions

English has two major future tense constructions, will and be going to. Additionally, English can also use the present tense with a future-marking adverbial to express futurity. However, the distributions of these future markers are not free but limited. Instead of discriminating the differences among these distributions through direct comparison to etymological meanings or intuitive examples, this study offers an account for the semantic and syntactic differences between the two major English future tense constructions by analyzing data retrieved from the British National Corpus (BNC). The focus of attention is chiefly on the semantic and syntactic differences that lead to the choices British English native speakers make when expressing futurity. Based on the empirical analysis of data from the BNC, this study demonstrates that distribution of the future tense constructions seems sensitive to the following factors: (1) event-time orientation (temporal posteriority) or present-time orientation (prospective aspect), (2) the levels of verbal dynamicity in the whole sentence, (3) contexts of subordination, and (4) different text categories. The analysis suggests that the futurity constructions are not in the same distribution but are semantically and syntactically different. Utilizing its findings, this study aims to enhance second language learners’ expression of futurity by providing pedagogical suggestions.

Two types of peripheral adjunct WHATs

This study investigates two types of adjunct WHATs merged at peripheral positions in Chinese. The L-WHAT is merged within VP and denotes a why-interpretation with an aggressive, prohibitive force. The H-WHAT is merged at the left periphery of a sentence and is exclusively used in expressing a speaker’s refutatory force without interrogativity. The two WHATs are encoded with different modalities: the L-WHAT with root modality while the H-WHAT with epistemic modality. It is proposed that the interpretations of the two types of WHATs are compositionally derived from the modality and speaker force. This study not only explores the origins of different interpretations of adjunct WHATs, but also advances a uniform approach in mapping the speaker force onto syntax.

Negator turned intersubjective speech-act adverbial

This study investigates the non-negating negator m̄ in Taiwanese. With respect to its function, this study argues that it is neither an intensifier nor a rhetorical marker. Furthermore, contrary to prevalent intuition, the combination m̄-tō is not parallel to the ostensible cognate bújiù in Mandarin Chinese. Instead, the non-negating m̄ is an intersubjective speech-act adverbial affix attaching to the head of FocP (realized as tō or tsiah) that takes scope over whatever follows. Typologically, this study uncovers another use of non-negating negation in natural languages, and consequently challenges the enterprise pursuing a unified analysis for the phenomena of the so-called expletive negation.

Nativised structural patterns of make light verb construction in Malaysian English

This study investigated nativised structural patterns of light verb constructions (LVCs) in Malaysian English using a corpus-based, descriptive approach to analyse grammatical innovations. To facilitate the analysis, a 100-million-word general corpus comprising threads from Lowyat.Net, a popular Internet forum in Malaysia, was created, and the British National Corpus (BNC) was used as the reference corpus. Using the Sketch Engine corpus tool, the three most frequently occurring make LVCs in the Malaysian English corpus were identified. The data was analysed to reveal the differences between the structures of make LVC in Malaysian English and its prototypical structure. The findings show that besides the non-isomorphic deverbal noun form, make LVCs in Malaysian English prefer taking the basic constituents of an LVC. Nativised LVCs are essentially those with zero articles and isomorphic deverbal nouns taking definite articles, determiners, and descriptive adjectives in their modifier slots. The zero article LVC is the most common nativised structure pattern due to the influence of substrate languages in Malaysian English.

Kěài ‘cute’ in Mandarin

The word kěài in Mandarin is semantically rich. However, little research has been devoted to examining its meanings and uses, let alone possible innovative usage following the popularity of social media platforms. Hence, this study aims to examine in detail (a) the descriptive range, meanings and functions of kěài, and (b) possible changes of its usage in Internet communication. To achieve these goals, a total of 800 tokens of kěài were collected and analyzed–400 from the Sinica Corpus and 400 from two widely used social media platforms, representing the data before and after social media platforms became popular. Our major findings are as follows: First, although human beings and non-human objects are what kěài mostly describes, its descriptive range is shifting to more abstract entities for much higher percentages of Abstract Entity and Event are found on the social media platforms. Second, the influence of age and gender factors has weakened. Third, although most of the non-human cases are described as kěài due to their external features, most of the human cases in the Sinica Corpus are called kěài for their external features while on the social media platforms, for their non-external features. Fourth, kěài conveys positive meanings most of the time, and the three most frequently found meanings of kěài in the Sinica Corpus are different from those on the social media platforms. Fifth, kěài is found to serve as hedges in both sets of data, but it is also used to show surprise on the social media platforms.