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Chinese Language · Linguistic Typology · Writing Systems · Cognitive-Functional Linguistics

​Liulin Zhang 张榴琳

Language belongs to human beings: it distinguishes homo sapiens from other species. 

Writing belongs to civilization: it serves and records the development of human civilization.

Homo sapiens has a history of hundreds of thousands of years, while human civilization only has a history of thousands of years: human beings lived for a long time without writing. Then why do we need writing now? What does writing do to human beings? What is the relationship between language and writing?

As a native Chinese speaker with some knowledge in
English and Japanese, I am trying to answer the above
questions from a contrastive perspective.

语言属于人类,是人类区别于其他物种的标志。

文字属于文明:是文字成就了文明,记录了文明。

作为一个物种,人类有数十万年的历史,而人类文明的历史却不过数千年——人类在漫长的历史中并没有文字。

那么现在我们又为什么需要文字?文字对于人类而言究竟有什么作用?文字和语言究竟是什么关系?

作为一名长期学外语的汉语母语者,我希望能通过跨语言对比研究来回答上述问题。

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· 普通语言文字学 · 语言类型学 · 文字系统 · 语言意识形态 · 认知功能语言学·

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The Effects of Writing on Language

语言演化领域的字本位假说

        文字固定一种语言的基本单位:字符能够明确记录的语言单位往往比较稳定,而字符所不能明确记录的语言单位相对而言更容易变异甚至消失。

        汉语言文字有世界上最长的连续演化史,只有从汉语言文字史出发才最容易看到语言与文字的普遍关系;从其他任何语言文字出发都很难看清全貌。

Written signs stabilize the basic units of a language, and affects users' understanding of language in general, thus having an effect on language ideology.

On Phonology: Those phonetic units and features that are clearly represented in writing have less variation than those units and features that are not represented in writing. 

On Morphology: The smallest meaningful unit of a language, i.e., morpheme, cannot be smaller than one sign in writing.

On Language Ideology: Written signs foreground the linguistic units that they represent in users' perception of language, thus making them salient in language ideology.

Lability of Verbs and
the Change-of-State Construction

主宾转换和状态改变

        语言中的主宾转换现象原型性地对应人类对于状态改变事件的认知。针对状态改变事件的复杂事件结构,人们可能有两种常用认知策略,主宾转换就产生了。

        从意义和功能的角度,“非宾格动词”“作格动词”“(广义)中动”“无标记被动”等概念都和状态改变有关。

      Labile verbs can alternate between the transitive use and the intransitive use. They prototypically denote change-of-state events that can either happen spontaneouly or caused by external forces. 

  • The complex event structure of change-of-state events can be profiled in two competing ways in human conceptualization: the agent-oriented way and the theme-oriented way, resulting in the transitive structure and the intransitive structure respectively.

  • The transitivity of labile verbs is negatively correlated with the likelihood of the spontaneous occurrence of the event.

  • Analytic languages such as Chinese are particularly rich in labile verbs. 

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