On a possible convergence area in Northern China

The received view that the differences among Sinitic languages are mostly limited to their phonology and, to a lesser extent, to the lexicon (Chao 1968), has been challenged in recent years, with plenty of studies showing that Chinese ‘dialects’ are, indeed, diverse at all levels, including morphology and (morpho-)syntax (see Chappell 2015a for an overview). Some major differences within the Sinitic branch follow areal patterns, in which contact is often claimed to play a crucial role. In our contribution, we would like to propose that there is an area within Northern China, spread over the Shanxi, Henan, Hebei, and Shandong provinces, in which we find Sinitic languages possessing some features not seen (or, at least, uncommon) elsewhere. These include: 1. reduced/nonconcatenative morphology (see Arcodia 2013, 2015; Lamarre 2015); 2. object markers based on speech act verbs (see Chappell 2013); and 3. structural particles with an l-initial (see Chen A. 2013, a.o.). Based on our own survey of a sample of 96 dialects, we shall discuss the distribution of these features, as well as their possible origins.

Some temporal expressions in early Southern Min play scripts

Drawing on the data in early Southern Min play scripts, this paper explores temporal expressions—in particular temporal adverbials—which bear on the issues of their grammatical categories and syntactic placement. Considerable space is devoted to clarifying two kinds of distinctions of temporal adverbials on the strength of attested examples. A distinction is made between deictic temporal adverbials and determiner phrase-derived temporal adverbials. Similarly, durative adverbials are shown to behave differently from punctual adverbials. Finally, I argue that the metonymic semantic shift of deictic temporal adverbials denoting tomorrow and yesterday/the day before yesterday is grounded in the constraint of proximity to the deictic center of today in connection with the backdrop of diachronic development.

A grammatical description of the placeholder are in spontaneous Japanese

When a speaker encounters a word-formulation problem in interaction, she may use a placeholder to saturate the syntactic slot of the target expression in the unfolding sentence. Japanese exhibits the placeholder are, which is assumed to derive from the demonstrative are ‘that.’ Despite rich studies on placeholders, no serious attention has been paid to grammatical parallelism and differences between a placeholder and its original lexical counterpart. In this paper, we focus on the nominal placeholder are (and its predicative variants) and the demonstrative are ‘that,’ and propose the set of criteria which capture their parallelism and differences in non-discrete terms.

汉语方言中源于连接词的句末先行义助词及语法化问题

摘要 汉语方言中句末先行义助词“正、再、至、□（[sa5]）”和“可”等兼具连接功能，文章考察其功能后，认为上述先行义助词源于祈愿句中相应连接词省略后项内容后的重新分析，是语法化而非征派（/移位）的结果。文章第四部分讨论了连接词发展为句末助词的相关问题，补充了连接词的语义来源类别。

The etymology of Korean ssal ‘uncooked grain’ and pap ‘cooked grain’

In this paper, I will provide etymological explanations for the two Korean words for ‘grain’: ssal ‘uncooked grain’ and pap ‘cooked grain.’ The word ssal ‘uncooked grain’ is a loanword from Middle Chinese bu-sat ‘Bodhisattva,’ linking the Buddhist holy figure to the type of food that has a sacred status in Korean culture. The support for this claim comes from the fact that (i) grains were sometimes associated with the Buddha’s body in Korea, and (ii) certain dialects of Japanese have also referred to rice—undoubtedly the most favored type of grain—as bosatsu ‘Bodhisattva’ or buppō-sama ‘Lord Buddha Dharma.’ Moreover, pap ‘cooked grain’ is most likely derived from the baby-talk term for ‘food,’ because cross-linguistically, baby-talk terms for ‘food’ or ‘to eat’ tend to be similar to /papa/ or /mama/, some of which shifted into the adult-talk term for food or a common type of food.

Ancient Chinese sentence final particle ěr 爾

The article amounts to a fully comprehensive study on the sentence final particle ěr 爾 in Classical Chinese. After an overview of the explanations of the functions of the particle in reference books, all relevant occurrences in the pre-Qín texts are analysed, and the results are compared with its usage in the documents of the Western Hàn era. The possible interpretations of its meaning(s) proposed by the author are subsequently put in relation to hypothetical etymological links based on the theory of Old Chinese morphology in Sagart’s vein.

On the sound change *ld > nd in Tibetic

This short note provides phonetic and phonological arguments in favour of the explanation of the sound change *ld > nd in Tibetic proposed by Sprigg (1972). It is argued that an alternative explanation by Gong (2016), resting on a novel interpretation of the consonant system of Common Central Tibetan, is not supported by the data and has no conceptual advantages.

The preservation of proto-Japanese tone class 2.5 in the Izumo region explained

In 1981, Okumura Mitsuo reported that the dialect of Izumo Taisha in western Japan had preserved remnants of the separate tone class 2.5, which until then had only been found in dialects in central Japan. His discovery proved that this tone class had formed part of proto-Japanese, but the phonetic realization in Izumo and in central Japan was totally different. The article offers a reconstruction of the proto-system of the Izumo region, as well as an explanation of how class 2.5 came to be (partly) preserved in Izumo. It is argued that this was through a series of rightward shifts of the /H/ tone. These shifts radiated out from the northwestern part of the region. In the period, when the shifts were active, a contour tone on the second syllable of class 2.5 blocked rightward /H/ tone shift in this class. In this way, the contour tone, although later lost, left a trace in the modern dialects.

Repenser l’ expression de la référence temporelle en chinois mandarin

Résumé En adoptant, de manière originale, une approche inter-linguistique de la référence temporelle en chinois mandarin, cette étude vise à mener une investigation globale et exhaustive des différents moyens linguistiques et non-linguistiques par lesquels le mandarin exprime, en l’ absence de tout marquage morphologique de temps, la référence temporelle d’ une situation, ainsi que leurs riches interactions. Nous prenons part au débat récent entre l’ approche tensée (centrée sur les langues indo-européennes) et l’ approche non-tensée (centrée sur les différences typologiques du mandarin) de la référence temporelle en mandarin, et nous donnons des arguments théoriques et empiriques en faveur de la dernière.

The Chinese Ideophone Database (CHIDEOD)

This article introduces the Chinese Ideophone Database (CHIDEOD), an open-source dataset, which collects 4948 unique onomatopoeia and ideophones (mimetics, expressives) of Mandarin, as well as Middle Chinese and Old Chinese. These are analyzed according to a wide range of variables, e.g., description, frequency. Apart from an overview of these variables, we provide a tutorial that shows how the database can be accessed in different formats (.rds, .xlsx, .csv, R package and online app interface), and how the database can be used to explore skewed tonal distribution across Mandarin ideophones. Since CHIDEOD is a data repository, potential future research applications are discussed.