Corpus-Based Contrastive Studies of English and Chinese

Tony McEnery, Richard Xiao

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136944895
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book is concerned with cross-linguistic contrast of major grammatical categories in English and Chinese, two most important yet genetically different world languages. This genetic difference has resulted in many subsidiary differences that are, among other things, related to grammar. Compared with typologically related languages, cross-linguistic contrast of English and Chinese is more challenging yet promising. The main theme of this book lies in its focus on cross-linguistic contrast of aspect-related grammatical categories, or, grammatical categories that contribute to aspectual meaning – both situation aspect at the semantic level and viewpoint aspect at the grammatical level – in English and Chinese.

The unique strength of this volume lies in that it is first corpus-based book contrasting English and Chinese. Given that the state of the art in language studies is to use corpora, the significance of the marriage between contrastive studies and the corpus methodology in this book is not to be underestimated.

1
Introduction

English and Chinese are two widely spoken world languages that differ genetically. This genetic difference has resulted in many subsidiary differences that are, among other things, related to grammar. Compared with typologically related languages, cross-linguistic contrast of English and Chinese is more challenging yet promising. The promise relates to the difference—by studying such language pairs in contrast, we can gain a better appreciation of the scale of variability in the human language system. The challenge arises from that promise—theories and observations based on closely related language pairs can give rise to conclusions which seem certain but which, when studied in the context of a language pair such as English and Chinese, become not merely problematized afresh, but significantly more challenging to resolve. This book is about this promise and this challenge.

In the chapters that follow, we will explore a series of features in contrast between English and Chinese. In each case the result is a challenge to our understanding of language followed by a reworking and expansion of that understanding. The features that we focus upon, which provide the main theme of this book, relate to the cross-linguistic contrast of aspectrelated grammatical categories, i.e. grammatical categories that contribute to aspectual meaning—both ‘situation aspect’ (i.e. inherent temporal properties of a situation) at the semantic level and ‘viewpoint aspect’ (i.e. the temporal perspective from which a situation is presented) at the grammatical level—in English and Chinese.

The marriage of aspect research and cross-linguistic contrast is, we would argue, an entirely natural one. On the one hand, research on aspect usually has a contrastive focus, as demonstrated by the works by Comrie (1976), Dahl (1985, 1999), Bybee et al. (1994), Smith (1997), and Miller (1999). On the other hand, a contrastive study should also have an aspectual focus as aspect is an important grammatical category. In Brown and Miller (1999), for example, aspect takes up the lion’s share of the work presented. While some languages may not have tense (e.g. Chinese), aspect appears to have been found in all human languages investigated so far (cf. Dahl 1985).

Nevertheless, while aspect is a common grammatical category (cf. Miller 1999: 42), languages may express aspectual meanings in different ways (cf. Lehmann 1999: 48). For example, English uses morphologically combined tense/aspect markers whereas Chinese uses aspect markers (a type of grammatical words) to express aspectual meaning (see Chapter 2). Yet subtle distinctions occur: while English and Chinese both have certain grammatical aspects (e.g. the progressive), they differ in their use of that shared aspect. Differences such as these are useful in accounting for the phenomena observed in attested language use, as will be shown in this book.

In spite of its focus on aspect, this book is not restricted to the grammatical category of aspect. Rather, it seeks to provide a systematic and contrastive account of aspect-related grammatical categories in English and Chinese on the basis of written and spoken corpus data of the two languages. So while our focus is upon aspect, the discussion of it will lead us to consider a wider range of grammatical features.

1.1 OVERVIEW OF THE BOOK

Aspect is compositional in nature. Aspectual meaning is the composite result of situation aspect and viewpoint aspect (Smith 1997) while situation aspect per se is compositional in that it is a synthetic result of the interaction between verb classes and arguments, adjuncts and viewpoint aspect at nucleus, core, and clause levels (Xiao and McEnery 2004a). In this “double” composition process, a variety of grammatical categories are involved, some of which are language independent while others are language specific (see Xiao and McEnery 2004b).

The intrinsic semantic features of verbs, which have been a focus of aspect research since Vendler (1967), play a major role in determining the aspectual meaning of a sentence. It is important to note that at the lexical level, resultative verb complements (RVCs) typically express a telic notion and add the concept of a goal or an endpoint to durative situations which would otherwise be atelic. ¹ With telic verbs, internal arguments become relevant at the core level of composition because quantified noun phrases behave differently from those that do not take a quantifier (Xiao and McEnery 2004b). In this sense, quantifying constructions (see Chapter 4) contribute powerfully to aspectual meaning. Our research, as presented in this book, reveals a number of grammatical categories that contribute to aspectual meaning at the clause level. They include, for example, aspect markers, temporal adverbials, quantifiers, passives, and negation, in addition to a number of language-specific structures in English and Chinese. The relationship of these grammatical categories to aspect will be explored in this book.

Following this Introduction, Chapter 2 explores aspect marking, which contributes directly to aspectual meaning. Our contrastive study of aspect marking in English and Chinese shows that while Chinese and English are typologically different, aspect markers in the two languages show a strikingly similar distribution pattern, especially across the two broad categories of narrative and expository texts. It is also interesting to note that while British English and American English have developed variations in spelling, word choice, and grammar, their use of aspect is strikingly similar—the distribution of aspect markers across our corpora of British and American English (see section 1.3 for descriptions of the data used in this book) is almost identical.

As will be shown in Chapter 3, by temporal adverbials, we mean completive and durative adverbials which have been used as diagnostic tests for determining the telicity value of a situation. They roughly correspond to in-and for-adverbials respectively in English and to pre-verbal and post-verbal temporal expressions in Chinese. In both languages there are a number of usage categories for both types of temporal expressions, which show a high level of similarity, in spite of some obvious differences. The distinction between in- and for-adverbials in English is principally mirrored by the different positions of time expressions in Chinese. In contrast, position does not appear to play such an important role in English, where the majority of both in- and for-adverbials occur in the post-verbal position (more than 95% for the former and above 80% for the latter, see Chapter 3). In terms of functions, the major functions of in-adverbials in English and pre-verbal time expressions in Chinese are to indicate period and scope/range. In both English and Chinese, negation closely interacts with aspect and seriously affects the reliability of completive and durative time expressions as tests for telicity. When they appear in negation, about two thirds of the total instances of English in-adverbials express a scope meaning, which is irrelevant to telicity, whilst in Chinese, negation accounts for three quarters of the total instances of pre-verbal time expressions indicating duration. Of the various usage categories established for time expressions in English, only in-adverbials that express a period meaning and for-adverbials that express a duration meaning are relevant to telicity tests. Similarly, of the various usage categories established for time expressions in Chinese, only those indicating a period meaning (typically, but not always, preceding the verb) and the post-verbal time expressions indicating duration are relevant to telicity tests.

Chapter 4 will show that Chinese employs numeral-classifier constructions obligatorily in quantification whereas in English a classifier is only required when noncount nouns are quantified. This cross-linguistic difference exists simply because Chinese is a non-inflectional language whereas nouns in English inflect for plurality morphologically. All of the eight semantic categories of classifiers exist in both Chinese and English, but classifiers in the two languages differ in a number of ways (see Chapter 4 for details). For example, classifiers are significantly more common in Chinese; unit classifiers and verbal classifiers are characteristic of Chinese whereas collective classifiers are more diversified in English; classifiers in English and Chinese display some language-specific syntactic differences; there are also some slight differences in the distribution of various categories of classifiers across genres in the two languages. Nevertheless, these differences are largely quantitative rather than qualitative. Classifiers are motivated cognitively, pragmatically, and conventionally in both English and Chinese. In other words, even though Chinese is recognized as a classifier language while English is not, the two languages show striking similarities in their classifier systems in spite of the different terms used and some quantitative differences.

Chapter 5 is concerned with passive constructions in English and Chinese. Passives always denote delimited situations with the implication of the successful achievement of a result probably because of the so-called “affectedness constraint” on the passive, i.e. the subject must be affected, which explains why an utterance such as *Angela is resembled by Mary is unacceptable. In this sense, passives have a function similar to that of RVCs. Our study indicates that while passive constructions in English and Chinese express a basic passive meaning, they also show a range of differences in terms of overall frequencies, syntactic features and functions, semantic properties, and distributions across genres (see Chapter 5 for details of the brief summary that follows). For example, passive constructions are nearly ten times as frequent in English as in Chinese. A number of reasons can be forwarded which help to account for this contrast between English and Chinese. Firstly, the unmarked be passives can be used for both static and dynamic situations while Chinese passives can only occur in dynamic events. Secondly, Chinese passives typically have a negative ‘semantic prosody’ (i.e. negative pragmatic meaning) while English passives (especially be passives) do not. Finally, English is “addicted to the passive voice” (Baker 1985: 121; cf. also Quirk 1968: 170), especially in formal writing, whereas Chinese tends to avoid syntactic passives wherever possible. Short passives (i.e. those without an explicit agent) typically account for over 90% of total occurrences of passives in both written and spoken English, a proportion significantly higher than that in Chinese, where long passives are the statistical norm, because historically an agent must normally be spelt out in passive constructions in Chinese, though this constraint has become more relaxed nowadays under the influence of English. A major distinction between passive constructions in the two languages is that Chinese passives are more frequently used with an inflictive meaning than English passives. This is probably due to the fact Chinese passives were used at early stages primarily for unpleasant or undesirable events. There are clearly genre variations in the distribution of passive variants in both languages. Passives in English occur more frequently in informative than imaginative genres. Reports/official documents and academic prose, in particular, show very high proportions of passives. In contrast, these two genres have the lowest proportions of passives in Chinese, where mystery/detective fiction and religious writing show exceptionally high proportions of passives. These differences are closely associated with the origins and functions of passive constructions in the two languages. The passive is primarily used to mark an impersonal, objective and formal style in English whereas it is typically an “inflictive voice” in Chinese.

As will be shown in detail in Chapter 6, negation may influence aspectual meaning in both English and Chinese because it can coerce a dynamic situation into a stative situation. For example, in We talked for a while, the dynamic event of talking is taken in the time frame for a while; in contrast, in We didn’t talk for a while, a stative situation (i.e. the state with no talking going on) is taken in the frame. Our research has uncovered some important differences, as well as similarities, in negation in English and Chinese. The two broad categories of explicit negation in English, not vs. no-negation, are primarily stylistically oriented whereas the distinction between the two broad types of explicit negation in Chinese, bu and mei-negation, is aspectually motivated. In terms of distribution across written and spoken registers, negation in English is 2.5 times as frequent in speech as in writing. Our Chinese corpora show that negation is 2.8 times as frequent in speech as in writing. In both English and Chinese, negation is generally more frequent in fiction, humour, and conversation whilst reports/ official documents and academic prose show the lowest frequency of all types of negation. Negation in English and Chinese demonstrates some language specific features. Negation in Chinese is closely allied with aspect. On the one hand, mei/meiyou as an adverb negates the realization of a situation while on the other hand bu and mei/meiyou are sensitive to the aspectual feature of dynamicity. In contrast, negation in English (either not or no-negation) does not appear to be sensitive to aspect marking or situation aspect features such as dynamicity. Nevertheless, negation in English also has its own features that are not relevant or apparent in Chinese. For example, (i) non-assertive forms typically follow the negator in a clause in English, and (ii) the polarities of the statement and the tag in a tag question in English are normally opposite.

The discussion in Chapter 6 of various negative forms and their language specific features in English and Chinese provide a basis for further cross-linguistic exploration of negation in the two languages in Chapter 7, where the scope and focus of negation as well as special usages such as transferred negation, double negation, and redundant negation in the two languages are contrasted.

1.2 THE CORPUS-BASED APPROACH TO CONTRASTIVE STUDIES

Contrastive research of English and Chinese has attracted great attention from the late 1970s onwards, particularly in mainland China. Many authored and edited volumes that contrast English and Chinese have been published in China over the past decades (e.g. Ren 1981, 1994; Zhang and Chen 1981; Zhao 1981; Wu 1982; Xu 1985; Wan 1988; Yang and Li 1990; Liu 1991; Lian 1993; Wang 1993; Fu and Yuan 1994; C. Liu 1994, 1998; Yu 1994; Wang 1994; Li 1996; Pan 1997; Shao 1997; Xiong 1997; Xiao 1998; Zhao 1999; Xu 2002; Pan and Tan 2006; Xu and Zhang 2006), but none of them is written in English and none of them, including those published recently, has used corpus data. ² Most of them are based on intuitions and confected examples while a few others have used translated data. Given that language studies now typically require the use of corpora, the existing books on contrastive studies of English and Chinese can uncontroversially be viewed as outmoded.

The predominance of intuitions in contrastive studies in China is possibly related to the guidelines established in China by Zhao (1979), stating that contrastive study is concerned with langue rather than parole. The consequence of these somewhat misleading guidelines is that, in some contrastive grammars, a growing gulf develops between an idealized form of Chinese which is the basis of the work presented and the Chinese language as it is used and experienced by speakers of modern Mandarin Chinese. Using translated data for contrastive studies is also problematic because of the nature of translations (further discussion to follow). Given the rapid development of the corpus methodology since the 1990s, which has “revolutionized” nearly all branches of linguistic investigation (see McEnery, Xiao, and Tono 2006), it is somewhat surprising that corpus data has been ignored to date in contrastive research undertaken on English and Chinese. Nevertheless, this avoidance of corpora is also expected, given the conflict between Zhao’s guidelines and the nature of corpus data (i.e. performance data, or parole), coupled with the difficulty involved in creating comparable corpora that can provide a reliable basis for the comparison of the two languages (cf. Chapter 8).

We decided to take a corpus-based approach to cross-linguistic contrast of English and Chinese for a number of reasons. While it is true that using intuitions and invented examples can reveal some interesting features of language use, intuitions are not always reliable, because the intuitions of individual researchers can be influenced by their dialects or sociolects, and also “because each of us has only a partial knowledge of the language, we have prejudices and preferences, our memory is weak, our imagination is powerful (so we can conceive o...

Table of contents

• Routledge Advances in Corpus Linguistics
• Contents
• Tables
• Figures
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Aspect Marking in English and Chinese
• 3 Temporal Adverbials and Telicity in English and Chinese
• 4 Quantifying Constructions in English and Chinese
• 5 Passives in English and Chinese
• 6 Negation in English and Chinese
• 7 Negation in English and Chinese
• 8 Challenge and Promise, and the Way Forward
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index