School of Chinese Language and Literature
Soochow University
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。
· 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·
Projects
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.
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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.
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The transitivity of labile verbs is negatively correlated with the likelihood of the spontaneous occurrence of the event.
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Analytic languages such as Chinese are particularly rich in labile verbs.