Verb compounds within canonical typology: Chinese separable verb compounds

1. Verb compounds within canonical typology: Chinese separable verb compounds Anna Siewierska Jiajin Xu Richard Xiao

2. Overview of the talk 1 Separable verb compounds (SVCs) 2 Canonical typological strategy 3 A case study of SVCs in Mandarin 2

3. Separable verb compounds Some languages have verb compounds which are made up of two parts, a verbal stem and a movable element standing before or after the verb in adjacency or close proximity Different terms in the literature separable verb compounds, split words, separable verbs, ionised words, discontinuous / detachable / breakable / discrete words, etc 3 3

4. An example of Chinese SVC • dan1xin1, lit. carry heart, ‘to worry’ • dan1-le yi1 shang4wu3 xin1, carry ASP one morning heart, ‘to be worried the whole morning’ • xin1 yi4zhi2 dan1-zhe, heart all the time carry ASP, ‘to have been worried all the time’ 4

5. Sound similar? 5 Derivation by infixing (e.g. abso-fucking-lutely) and syntactic interposing (e.g. ofbloody course) in English Separable complex verbs in Dutch (aankomen ‘arrive’) and German (ankommen ‘arrive’) But Chinese SVCs are … 5

6. …essentially different • 1) Insertions in English infixing and interposing • Almost exclusively restricted to expletives, euphemisms, and amplifiers • Acting as an ‘emotive intensifier’ • In contrast, discontinuous use of Chinese SVCs has a greater variety of insertions and discourse / pragmatic functions • Insertions as head / tail satellites: aspect markers, RVCs, quantifiers, classifiers, modifiers, etc • Providing extra information • Acting as a mitigator / softener • Showing casualness • Expressing negative emotions such as disapproval • Enhancing rhythm – important in a syllable-timed language like Chinese 6

7. …essentially different • 2) A significant difference between SVCs in Mandarin and the split prefix phenomenon in Dutch (e.g. binnenkomen, ‘to come in’) and German (e.g. abfahren, ‘to drive off/depart’) • Chinese SVCs are not words with a separable affix • E.g. dan1xin1 ‘worry’ V O 7

8. …essentially different 8 • 3) SVCs in Dutch and German can have a wide range of constituents of all types as insertions, including complex NGs and subordinate clauses as in the example below • A Dutch example of opbellen ‘ring up’ • Ik bel op • Ik bel hem op I ring him up • Ik bel hemmorgen op I ring him tomorrow up • Ik bel de manwaarvan ik houd op I ring the man that I love up • ...which is completely impossible in Chinese 8

9. Why are SVCs interesting? • 1) SVCs are a large class of verbs in Chinese which cannot be marginalised • 2) They satisfy none of the ‘universal criteria’ for wordhood (Dixon and Aikhenvald 2002: 19-20) • ‘A grammatical word consists of a number of grammatical elements which (a) always occur together, rather than scattered through the clause (the criterion of cohesiveness); (b) occur in a fixed order; (c) have a conventionalised coherence and meaning’ • Criterion (c) means that speakers of the language ‘may talk about a word (but are unlikely to talk about a morpheme)’ 9

10. Why are SVCs interesting? • 3) SVCs violate one of the most fundamental principle of the theory of word formation • The Principle of Lexical Integrity: Word-internal structures are not accessible to rules of syntax (Booij 1990: 45) • 4) SVCs are listed as words, but they clearly have some ‘phrasal’ properties, thus straddling the boundary of morphology and syntax • E.g. the analysable internal structures of Chinese SVCs 10

11. Canonical typology • To study such fuzzy and cross-border grammatical categories, canonical typology (CT) has proved to be a useful strategy (cf. Bond 2007; Corbett 2007; Nikolaeva 2008), e.g. • Suppletive forms • Agreement • Negation • Syncretism • … 11

12. Standard strategy in typological research (Croft 2003: 14) • Determine the particular structure or situation type of interest • Examine the morpho-syntactic construction(s) or strategies used to encode that situation type • Search for dependencies between the constructions used for that situation and other linguistic factors • i.e. other structural features and external functions expressed by the structure, or both 12

13. Canonical typological approach • Start with a linguistic phenomenon • Establish a general definition for identifying that linguistic category • Construct a set of features or criteria for the typical (canonical) case of the category • Use the criteria to investigate the relevant categories in languages 13

14. Canonical typological approach • Start with a linguistic phenomenon • Establish a general definition for identifying the linguistic category in question • Construct a set of features or criteria for the canonical case of the category • Use the criteria to investigate the relevant categories in languages 14

15. How can corpora inform CT? In CT, the features are usually collected from the literature The collection could be selective, subjective and arbitrary Can the selection of features be more objective and reliable? We seek to answer this question from the corpus linguistic perspective The corpus-based approach makes it possible for variational parameters of SVCs to be summarised exhaustively and more objectively by looking at a large amount of attested language use simultaneously 15

16. A case study of Chinese SVCs What are common types of insertions and external patterns of discontinuous use of SVCs in Mandarin? How can canonical features be identified on the basis of frequency? How can the study of SVCs in Chinese contribute to the research of similar phenomena in other languages? 16

17. Prevalence of SVCs in Mandarin The 2002 edition of the Modern Chinese Dictionary includes 3,236 types of SVCs (Zhu 2006: 29) Four categories: verb-object (97%), verb-complement, subject- predicate, and coordinative Given their prevalence, no grammar of Chinese can turn a blind eye to the ‘verb-object paradox’ (Packard 2003: 108) 17

18. Corpora • Two corpora are used in this study • The Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (LCMC) for written Chinese • The Lancaster Los Angeles Corpus of Spoken Chinese (LLSCC) for spoken Chinese • The LCMC is a balanced corpus of written Chinese composed of one million words proportionally sampled from fifteen genres ranging from news, fiction to academic prose published in mainland China around 1991 (see McEnery, Xiao & Mo 2003) 18

19. Corpora • The LLSCC comprises one million words of dialogues (55%) and monologues (45%) in Chinese, covering both spontaneous (57%) and scripted (43%) speech in six spoken genres • The two corpora are also tokenised and POS-tagged • They provide an empirical basis for our quantitative and qualitative analysis of SVCs in Chinese 19

20. Seed SVCs for data extraction • A total of 1,738 commonly used SVCs listed in A Dictionary of Split Word Usage in Modern Chinese (Yang 1995) were used as seeds to automatically extract all instances of possible SVCs exhaustively when their the head and tail are separated, in either forward or backward direction, by a span of 1-10 words • 2793 raw concordance lines were extracted from the two corpora 20

21. Human evaluation and annotation • Each concordance line was evaluated independently by two native Chinese speakers in order to remove noise in automatically extracted results • Only 565 true instances of discontinuous use of SVCs are retained for further annotation and analysis • Type of insertion, direction of separation, word semantics, sentence semantics (i.e. pragmatic meaning), sentence type, genre 21

22. Syntagmatic pattern of SVCs 22

23. Head satellites of SVCs • Aspect insertion • Expanded aspect insertion • Note: The ? slot can be filled or left blank 23

24. Head satellites of SVCs • RVC insertion • Expanded RVC insertion • …hardly surprising given that RVCs can be analysed as markers of the “completive aspect” in Chinese (Xiao and McEnery 2004) 24

25. Tail satellites of SVCs • Classifier (CL) • 21% (116 SVCs) contain a classifier • Nominals in Mandarin are typically preceded by a classifier • Quantifier (MC) • 19% (108 SVCs) contain a quantifying construction • Modifier (MOD), i.e. pre-modifiers of tails • Possessive pronouns (64 times, 11%) • Adjectival modifiers (63 times, 11%) • Nominal items (59 times, 10%) • Question word (i.e. shen2me ‘what’, 26 times, 5%) • Also combinations of these elements 25

26. Aspect marker (±) SVCT SVCH LE DA Modifier GE HAO Classifier Resultative verb complement (±) YI Quantifier SVC network:Lexical and grammatical patterning 26

27. Words or phrases? • Synchronically, located somewhere on the continuum between words and phrases (cf. Guo and Qian 2004) words SVCs idioms phrases • Diachronically, wordhood subject to language change • Many compound words in current use have evolved from phrases (e.g. daoqian ‘apologise’, jugong ‘bow’) • Givón (1971): ‘Today's morphology is yesterday's syntax.’ • Two criteria - depending on the type and number morpheme(s) in the insertion – • Over half of discontinuous use of SVCs in our data (i.e. 54% if RVCs are seen as quasi-aspect markers), together with their combined cognates, can be analysed as legitimate compound words 27

28. Two overarching criteria • Structural criteria • Host dependency • Head dependence enjoys priority over tail dependence • Phonological criteria • PrWd restriction (Feng 2001, 2002) • A disyllabic unit is the typical prosodic foot in Chinese • A trisyllabic unit can also be a prosodic word 28

29. Structural criteria • According to the host dependency criteria of the canonical typological approach • a) SVCs with a clitic-like aspect marker alone are compounds rather than phrases • b) SVCs with an RVC attached to the head verb as quasi-compounds • c) Other modifiers (classifiers, modifiers, etc) attached to the tail (represented typically by a object or complement) are least possible compounds • Priority: a > b > c 29

30. Phonological criteria • Various manifestations of SVCs define a continuum of phonological conditions which complement the structural criteria • a) The combined uses of head and tail are disyllabic compounds • b) SVCs in which the head and tail are separated by one single morpheme are possible compounds under the Trisyllabic Foot Rule (TFR) of prosodic morphology (McCarthy & Prince 1993; 1995) • c) The head and tail separated by polymorphemic insertions like quantifiers, adjectival modifiers etc are phrases • Priority: a > b > c 30

31. Conclusions • We have used the corpus-based approach to generalise canonical internal structures of Chinese SVCs • The structural and phonological criteria we have proposed work well to define wordhood of SVCs in Mandarin • The approach combining canonical typology and corpus methodology could also be useful in research of similar phenomena in other languages 31

32. Thank you! Richard.Xiao@edgehill.ac.uk