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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

Received: 12 June 2023     Accepted: 3 July 2023     Published: 31 July 2023
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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.

Published in International Journal of Language and Linguistics (Volume 11, Issue 4)
DOI 10.11648/j.ijll.20231104.15
Page(s) 126-135
Creative Commons

This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, provided the original work is properly cited.

Copyright

Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Science Publishing Group

Keywords

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

References
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[4] Lars, Johanson. (2005). Contact-induced change in a code-copying framework. Edith Esch, Mari C.
[5] Hsu Jia Ling. (1994). Englishization and language change in modern Chinese in Taiwan. World Englishes. Vol. 13, No. 2.
[6] Fu Sinian. (1919). How we improve Baihua? New Trend. 1, 2-4.
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[9] Norman, Jerry. (2000). Chinese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[10] Lin Hua. (2001). A Grammar of Mandarin Chinese. Nunchen: Lincom Europa.
[11] Zhang Yisheng. (2001). The Selective Restrictions of “N+们” and the expressive functions of “N们”. Studies of the Chinese Language. 2: 201-211.
[12] Eiji Noshimoro. (2003). Measuring and Comparing the Productivity of Mandarin Chinese Suffixes. Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing. 2: 49-76.
[13] Kubler, C. C. (1985). A study of Europeanized Grammar in Modern Written Chinese. Taibei: Students’ Publishing House.
[14] Wang Li. (1943). Grammar of Modern Chinese. Beijing: The Commercial Press.
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[16] Zhu Yifan. (2011). Translation and the development of Modern Chinese. Beijing: Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press.
[17] Guo Hongjie. (2005). The cognitive perspective study on the influence of English on Modern Chinese. Shanghai: Shanghai Jiaotong University Press.
[18] Li Audry Y. H. and Shi Yuzhi. (2015). The story of –men. Contemporary Linguistics. 2 (1), 27-36.
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[22] Xu Dan. (2011). The plural marker –men of the nonhuman noun in the dialects of He Zhou and the neighboring areas. Contemporary Linguistics. 6, 9-22.
[23] Si Guo. (2001). Translation Studies. Beijing: China Translation and Publishing Corporation.
Cite This Article
  • APA Style

    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

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    ACS Style

    Ye He; Yong Zhong; Xinmei Jiang; Donald Winford. 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. Int. J. Lang. Linguist. 2023, 11(4), 126-135. doi: 10.11648/j.ijll.20231104.15

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    AMA Style

    Ye He, Yong Zhong, Xinmei Jiang, Donald Winford. 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. Int J Lang Linguist. 2023;11(4):126-135. doi: 10.11648/j.ijll.20231104.15

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  • @article{10.11648/j.ijll.20231104.15,
      author = {Ye He and Yong Zhong and Xinmei Jiang and Donald Winford},
      title = {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},
      journal = {International Journal of Language and Linguistics},
      volume = {11},
      number = {4},
      pages = {126-135},
      doi = {10.11648/j.ijll.20231104.15},
      url = {https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijll.20231104.15},
      eprint = {https://article.sciencepublishinggroup.com/pdf/10.11648.j.ijll.20231104.15},
      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.},
     year = {2023}
    }
    

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    AU  - Yong Zhong
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    AB  - 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.
    VL  - 11
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Author Information
  • College of Foreign Languages, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China

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

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

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

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