Morphological Changes of Chinese Under the Influence of Language Contact: The Usages of Suffix –men Before and After the May Fourth Movement and Its Current Usages:: Science Publishing Group

Morphological Changes of Chinese Under the Influence of Language Contact: The Usages of Suffix –men Before and After the May Fourth Movement and Its Current Usages

Ye He¹, Yong Zhong¹, Xinmei Jiang², Donald Winford³

¹College of Foreign Languages, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China

²School of Chinese Ethnic Minority Languages and Literatures, Minzu University of China, Beijing, China

³Linguistics Department, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA

International Journal of Language and Linguistics, Volume 11, Issue 4, July 2023

Pages: 126-135

Received: Jun. 12, 2023

Accepted: Jul. 03, 2023

Published: Jul. 31, 2023

DOI: 10.11648/j.ijll.20231104.15

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Abstract

The study examines the diachronic changes during the May Fourth Movement and synchronic variation of the current use of the suffix -men, based on data from two corpora, Center for Chinese Linguistics (CCL) and Text of Recent Chinese (TorCH). Investigation in CCL shows that the suffix -men had already been used as a plural marker of human nouns in Qing Dynasty, while the usage of the suffix -men spreads from human to non-human nouns after the May Fourth Movement. Meanwhile, the prosodic and semantic constraints on the use of the suffix -men with human nouns have also been greatly relaxed. Investigation of the TorCH corpus reveals information on the current usage of suffix -men: the constraints on the usage of the suffix -men after human nouns and nonhuman nouns have been further loosened and the distribution of -men in discourse genres varies from a higher frequency of –men in prose and fiction to a lower frequency in scholarly literature. In the case of the development of -men since the May Fourth Movement, I argue the change is due to the type of borrowing referred to as frequential copying under the framework of code-copying. Code-internal factor of the use of -men as a plural marker in Chinese before May Fourth Movement is a prerequisite of copying, and the extra-linguistic factors, that is, the language ideology of improving Baihua through copying the grammar of Indo-European languages after the May Fourth and the increasing use of English since the adoption of opening-up policy, have greatly stimulated the copying of the plural marker from model code onto basic code.

Keywords

Suffix -men, Language Contact, Explicit Marker of Plurality, Language Ideology

To cite this article

Ye He, Yong Zhong, Xinmei Jiang, Donald Winford. (2023). Morphological Changes of Chinese Under the Influence of Language Contact: The Usages of Suffix –men Before and After the May Fourth Movement and Its Current Usages. International Journal of Language and Linguistics, 11(4), 126-135. https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijll.20231104.15

Copyright © 2023 Authors retain the copyright of this article.
This article is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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