Section A — Linguistics & Languages

This paper takes stock of the major lines and figures of modern linguistic research on the grammar, phonology, and history of the Chinese language in Central and Eastern Europe, spanning the past two centuries. I will not only introduce the personalities and their achievements in the study of Chinese, but also point out their chief contributions to the development of modern linguistic theory and general linguistics. I will pick up the topic beginning with Chajim Steinthal and Hans Georg von der Gabelentz, two 19th century German scholars, who were both acknowledged investigators of both Chinese and general linguistics (although they would not have used the latter term in their own time), then move on to the 20th century, with obvious emphasis on scholars/studies from Germany and Russia, these places being the main centers of sinological linguistics in our region, but also incorporating the achievements of linguists from other countries of this politico-geographic area (Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary). I will point out how these people and their work influenced the wider linguistic public, but also how, in certain respects, they failed to have their expected effects outside the domain of Chinese linguistics. The talk will then conclude with describing the present situation: the state of pursuing Chinese linguistics in these countries in these very years.

Casacchia Giorgio: The European Lexicography of the Chinese Language and the Development of Chinese Bilingual Dictionaries

Chinese linguistic studies are characterized by one of the most ancient and impressive lexicographical tradition in the world, but bilingual lexicography has been scarcely represented until the end of Ming dynasty, with the important exception of a few Tang dynasty Chinese–Sanskrit dictionaries.

The European bilingual lexicography flourished in China at the end of the XVIth century and has had a massive impact on autochthonous linguistic studies, influencing the new development of Chinese bilingual lexicography. In fact, innovations and methodologies were integrated by the Chinese lexicographers and became characteristics of native lexicography.

First of all, the transcription of Chinese characters in roman letters with diacritic marks for the tones (first found in Ricci and Ruggeri’s dictionary and in Trigault’s work) and the arrangement of lemmas following the alphabetic order of phonetic transcription (for the first time used in Brollo’s dictionary) are still employed in Chinese bilingual and monolingual dictionaries worldwide.

Secondly, the massive development of bilingual dictionaries dedicated to local dialects, essentially due to Protestant missionaries, such as R. Morrison or J. Edkins, was another important novelty in this field of studies, as the studies of dialects in China, inaugurated by the Fangyan during the Han dynasty, was one of the less developed fields of Chinese lexicography.

Our intervention aims to retrace the history of the development of bilingual lexicography in China during Ming and Qing dynasties, paying particular attention to the tension between autochthonous tradition and foreign impact and to the merging of different elements of European and Chinese traditions.

Lara Colangelo: The Influence of European Languages on Modern Chinese Morphology and Syntax: Europeanized Grammar in the Translation of Western Novels at the Beginning of the XX Century

Great changes took place in China between the end of the XIX and the beginning of the XX century due to the impact of the Western World. Chinese language itself was strongly influenced by Western languages and new morpho-syntactic elements began to appear. Those elements, which scholars usually refer to as Europeanized grammar, were mainly introduced by the means of written translations of Western literary works.

Many scholars have pointed out the importance of the May Fourth Movement in the process of linguistic europeanization (Xie Yaoji 谢耀基1990, He Yang 贺阳 2008, etc.), but an in-depth analysis still deserves to be carried on in order to clarify the role exerted in this process by the translations of Western novels published on literary periodicals –such as Xin Xiaoshuo 新小说, Xiuxiang Xiaoshuo 绣像小说, Xiaoshuo Yuebao 小说月报 etc.- in the first two decades of the XX century, even before the May Fourth Movement. The paper will try to illustrate examples of Europeanized grammar that can be found in some of the above-mentioned periodicals and to summarize their main features in a morphological and syntactic perspective.

Armen Alexanyan: Again on Sino-Iranica

The problem of linguistic contacts between different languages and peoples seems to be very important in few aspects:

1. an aspect of clarification of mechanisms and strategies of penetration and assimilation of loanwords in recipient language (here Chinese)

2. an aspect of phonetic reconstruction of recipient language and of how these loanwords were adopted and interpreted

3. an aspect of so called inculturation (penetration and assimilation of certain kind of culture, e.g. religious beliefs etc.).

This paper deals with linguistic contacts between Chinese and Iranian peoples, so called Sino-Iranica.

First investigations in this field were made by BERTHOLD LAUFER (1874-1934) in his capital volume of ‘Sino-Iranica’, but Laufer himself asserted, that the real pioneer in this research was Robert Gauthiot, who dedicated few articles to Buddhistic termini technici (it is remarkable, that these articles were mentioned in classic work of Chavannes and Pelliot on Chinese Manichaean manuscripts). In general, the work of Laufer deals with botanic nomenclature, although in Appendices are added few cultural loanwords (official title, for example). Most eminent researchers of this matter are P.Pelliot, J.Harmatta, E.G.Pulleyblank.

The most interesting are Iranian loanwords in Chinese, that were adopted from sphere of religion. In China were penetrated two Iranian religions – Zoroastrianism (sabao) and Manichaeism (moni jiao). Zoroastrian texts in Chinese are lost, but we have some Manichaean treatises (more or less fragmentary) with many Iranian (mostly Pehlevi and Sogdian) loanwords. These are titles of Manichaean clergy (e.g. mushe from Middle Persian možak, fuduodan from Middle Persian aftadan etc.), titles of Manichaean canonical books (dayinglun from Middle Persian ’wnglywn via Greek euaggelion etc.), names of Manichaean gods etc.

Detailed analysis of such kind of loanwords could help to reconstruct how were adopted and adapted phenomena of different culture, how were these interpreted and included in Chinese culture.

Panel A2 — Research on Grammar and Phonetics

Chair: Huba Bartos; Discussant: Luisa Maria Paternicò; 101 (Hall 1); Thursday, July 15th, 16:00-18:00

Henning Klöter: Special Numerals, Vertical Strokes and an Illegible Illative: Explaining language in the “Arte de la Lengua Chio Chiu”

The "Arte de la lengua chio chiu" (Arte) is presumably the oldest Chinese grammar extant today. It was written by a Spanish missionary based among the Chinese settlers of Manila in the early 17th century. The recorded variety can unambiguously be identified as belonging to the Sinitic Min group. It contains traces of the modern Southern Min varieties of Zhangzhou, Quanzhou, and Chaozhou, which is very likely the result of contact between speakers of these dialects.

My paper focuses on the devices that are used in the Arte to explain Southern Min phonology and morphosyntax. A common criticism with reference to missionary grammars points to the application of the traditional Greco-Latin grammar model in the analyses of Asian languages that do not possess overt inflectional morphology. Conversely, typological features foreign to European languages remain unrecognized as they do not fit the analytical model. Addressing this criticism, I show that the Arte uses a number of explanatory devices which do not qualify as application of Greco-Latin grammatical paradigms. These devices include (1) the use of non-terminological explanatory devices such as the use of transcriptions and the arrangement of examples, (2) the avoidance of terminology, (3) the questioning of existing terminology by denying its relevance, (4) the redefinition of existing terminology, and (5) terminological innovation. I conclude that the Arte by no means conceals linguistic data by the use an inappropriate model. Instead, the author uses the model rather flexibly in his treatment of linguistic features foreign to Indo-European languages.

Emanuele Raini: Martino Martini, S.I. and the Romanization of Chinese

Since the arrival of the first European missionaries in Macau, different systems of transcription for the pronunciation of Chinese dialects had been made.

The first attempt to impose a standard for Mandarin was made by Ricci S.I., in the early 1600s, followed by a second attempt by the Trigault S.I. in 1626.

Martini S.I. initially used a Romanization system based on the Portuguese orthography, clearly descendant from that of Ricci; according to this system of Romanization, Martini compiled the first grammar of Mandarin Chinese.

But later, in all his works after 1654, he decided to change the Romanization, switching to a system based on Spanish orthography.

The paper aims to illustrate how the two systems of Romanization used by Martini influenced his confreres in China, along with many European scholars, since that time on. The contribution will also try to speculate about the reasons that led Martini to switch from the Portuguese to the Spanish standard, the latter being theoretically more exotic to him than the Portuguese, which he (being a Padroado missionary) was more familiar to.

Luisa Maria Paternicò: Martino Martini’s Grammar of the Chinese Language

Martino Martini (1614-1661) was the main contributor to historical and geographical knowledge about China in seventeenth century Europe. His works strongly influenced the intellectuals of his time. He was also author of a less popular, though not less important, work: a grammar of the Chinese language.

During his journey to Europe as Procurator of the China mission, Martini wrote a Chinese grammar in Latin. The original manuscript has probably gone lost, but many copies have been found.

According to Bertuccioli, Martini attended to the compilation of a Grammatica Sinica, in 1652, while he was detained by the Dutch in Batavia for eight months. He left a copy of it to Andreas Cleyer (1634-1697/98). The manuscript was sent to Europe in 1698 and was preserved in Berlin. In 1716, T. S. Bayer (1694-1738) made a copy of it, but the original has not been found.

Once in Europe, Martini left another copy of the grammar to Jacob Gohl (1596-1667), a Dutch orientalist. From this original manuscript other copies were most likely made, and this could explain the presence of grammars very similar to that of Martini’s in the libraries of Glasgow, Berlin and Krakow. These copies have been in different moments modified and extended by Philippe Couplet (1623-1693) and Christian Mentzel.

Two copies with an identical structure but entitled, Grammatica Linguae Sinensis, have been found in Cambrai and in Vigevano. The latter was Martini’s gift to Juan Caramuel (1606-1682), a Spanish polymath who had studied Chinese with him.

Further researches have led to find a printed version of Martini’s Grammatica Linguae Sinensis attached to 1696 edition of M. Thévénot’s Relations des divers voyages curieux. Thus, Martini’s grammar has been proved to be the first descriptive grammar ever written and published of Mandarin Chinese.

Mathieu Missud: The Conference on Unification of Pronunciation 讀音統一會 (1913): State of the Art on the Initial Act of Linguistic Planning of the Modern State at the Eve of its Century

While every (socio)linguist in the Chinese field knows how language planning is important for understanding the evolution of the language in the last 100 years, yet not a single one ever really investigated the initial act of language policy which was organized in Beijing in 1913 by the Ministry of Education: the Conference of Unification of the Pronunciation.

We will try to investigate towards two directions: how this event of choosing one national language was considered on the spot, and how the perception of this event teaches us about the way to design the history of the Chinese language one century later.

Through a brief literature review collected in Europe, China and Taiwan, we will show how historians and linguists minimized the importance of this event behind the political turmoil of 1913, the May Fourth Movement, who participated or witnessed a dispute in the 30s, and of course the Foundation of the People’s Republic and a few years later of the Commission on the Chinese Script Reform. This analysis will also show how linguists remember the passionate problem of the writing system while the very scope of this conference was to decide the standard of pronunciation.

We borrow our methodological tools to both fields of history and sociology:

- as a historian, we were the first linguist to look through archives and use materials written by participants themselves, sometimes by their own hand, in their diaries and memoires, but also by intellectuals of their time,

- as a European researcher in social sciences, this research was also a field work; major linguists in China and Taiwan were interviewed showing their point of view about this event, its relation with language planning and the building of our own academic field: linguistics.

Panel A3 — Terminology, Lexica and Modes of Expression

Chair: Marie-Claude Paris; 101 (Hall 1); Friday, July 16th, 09:00-11:00

Daniel Z. Kadar: Historical Intercultural Politeness - A Case from the Ryukyus

This historical sociopragmatic (or 'pragmaphilological', cf. Jucker, 1995) study introduces the preliminary findings of a project that deals with the education of politeness in the Ryukyu Kingdom. Relying on the late Ming Ryukyuan source Xue-guan-hua 學官話 ('Learning Mandarin'), I map the ways in which Okinawan learners of Chinese were educated in Chinese polite communication. While currently Japanese (and Okinawan language) is an ‘honorific-rich’ language and Chinese is an ‘honorific-poor’ one, in the Ming Dynasty when Xue-guan-hua was compiled Chinese had a larger honorific lexicon than Japanese that expressed honorification partly through morphosyntactic changes (Kádár, 2007). Consequently, the teaching of honorifics and honorific communication played a particularly important role in language education.

The source studied and the results of the present research are not only interesting from the perspective of the sinologist, but also this is the first historical pragmatic intercultural Sino-Japanese (Okinawan) study.

Gianninoto Mariarosaria: The Introduction of Sociology in China and the Development of Sociological Lexicon

The first steps of the introduction of sociology in China could be retraced at the end of the XIXth century, in a period of transition between the end of the yangwu movement and the emergence of the reformist movement. During the last decade of the XIXth century, classes of qunxue were given by Kang Youwei at the Changxing academy in Canton (the effective sociological content is still debated).

In this first period, the history of sociology in China is essentially the history of translation of sociological works. In a few years, appeared the adaptations of The Study of Sociology of Spencer (1092) and Evolution and ethics of Huxley by Yan Fu (1989), the translations of Shakaigaku of Kishimoto Tadashi by Zhang Binglin (1092) and The theory of socialization of H.Giddings by Wu Jianchang (1903). A great amount of translation of sociological works and a number of articles and essays by Chinese authors were published.

In these years the essential notions of sociological thought were introduced and numerous terms of the sociological lexicon were coined and refined (or sometimes disappeared, substituted by other terms). Different studies have analyzed the evolution of Chinese lexicon at the end of the Qing dynasty (Masini, 1993) and the introduction of crucial notions and terms in specific fields, such as political economy, international law, physics (for example, Xiong, 1994 ; Lacker, Amelung, Kurtz eds., 2001) but the evolution of sociological lexicon has been less analyzed.

This lecture aims to analyze the evolution of a number of key-terms of the sociological lexicon, such as sociology, socialization, evolution, community et sim., comparing the first translations with their originals and taking into account a numbers of selected articles by Chinese authors, in order to retrace the evolution of notions and terms and the peculiarities of this process of introduction and indigenization.

Victoria Bogushevskaya: ‘GRUE’ in Chinese: On the Problem of the Original Meaning of Polysemous 青qīng

The composite category blue-green, or ‘GRUE’ (a portmanteau of Eng. ‘green’ and ‘blue’), is seen in many languages. Besides these colours, its Chinese equivalent qīng additionally denotes ‘black’. This paper deals with the semantic analysis of qīng’s every existed meaning, attempts to determine the sequence of their acquisition and brings forward the hypothesis about the reasons of such syncretism.

We examine the morphological, etymological and anthropological proves in favour of its original meaning ‘green’ rather than ‘blue’, analyze the samples of qīng’s usage in “Shijing”, Tang and Song poems.

We argue against the reasoning that the meaning ‘black’ was a result of Zhao Gao’s arbitrariness, and suggest the following explanations:

a) qīng was used to denote ‘dark/black’ only in certain dialect area during the Zhanguo Period, while the meaning ‘GRUE’ was a lexical norm. The unification of the country in 221 BC could favour the interference of some dialect meanings into the common language;

b) it has intralinguistic origins: during the certain colour lexicon development stage it denoted basic cold colours with the “hyper-meaning” ‘dark’; at a later stage the general meaning split, but the reflexes of this unity remained in some combinations.

Qīng is one of the five canonical colours in China, although it has a binary word-formation function – as a radical in derived colour lexemes in wenyan and as a lexical morpheme in attributive compounds in modern Chinese - it is not one of the basic colour terms in contemporary Chinese, because there are separate psychologically salient terms for green (lǜ), blue (lán) and black (hēi).

The hints for translation of qīng in different combinations will also be given and illustrated.

Murielle Fabre: Topic Between Subject and Object : The Chinese Case of Interplay Between Syntax and Semantics During On-line Sentence Comprehension

One of the most intriguing questions within the field of linguistics and particularly in the field of Chinese linguistics is whether and how Chinese language displays well-known cross-linguistical properties.

In the present research, this investigation is carried on through experimental neuro-psycholinguistic analysis of word order, hoping that the study of language processing architecture could shed light on the controversial status of grammatical relationships in Chinese syntax.

This paper takes as its starting point the typological claim of Li and Thompson (1976), who first characterised Chinese as a topic-prominent language, and is rooted in the linguistic analysis of the subsequent literature (Liu Danqing 2005; Xu Liejiong 2003) focusing on the word order induced by the topic.

Interwoving linguistics methodology and cognitive sciences approach this study is built on an ERP (Event-Related Potentials) experimental design, conducted in Peking Univesity at the Center of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (Beijing, RPC). This kind of experiment is able to record electrophysiological responses of the brain of Mandarin native speakers while reading topical sentences presenting SOV/OSV word order, multiple initial NPs pattern.

ERP responses -elicited by the sentence reading- display some correlates reflecting: the processing of semantic (N400) and syntactic (P600) information, and sentence reanalysis cost (LAN, ELAN).

Those correlates are the neurophysiological indices of the brain processes dealing with different information types; we may therefore reveal sentence processing strategies of Chinese native speakers.

Sentence understanding involves not only the retrieval of the meaning of single words, but also the identification of the relation between the initial multiple NPs waiting to be assigned a syntactic role in the sentence. It is therefore interesting to investigate how the brain manages to map sentence forms which do not display any marker of topicalisation onto meaning.

Panel A4 — Analyses of Grammar and Morphology

Chair: Henning Klöter; 101 (Hall 1); Friday, July 16th, 11:30-13:30

Marie-Claude Paris: On Some Aspects of Aspect in Mandarin Chinese

In this paper I study the cooccurrence restrictions between postverbal durational complements and the aspectual markers suffixed to the predicates that precede them in Mandarin. Two types of patterns are generally recognized in the literature: (a) a pattern where the verb is obligatorily copied and is suffixed, as in (2). (1) below is ungrammatical because the verb is not copied. (1) *xia yu hen jiu le (pattern a) (2) xia yu xia-le hen jiu le « it has been raining for a long time » (b) a pattern where the verb can neither be copied nor suffixed. (3) is ungrammatical because the verb is copied. Only (4) is well-formed. (3) *ta dao Taiwan dao-le Taiwan yijing you yi ge yue le (pattern b) (4) ta dao Taiwan yijing you yi ge yue le « it’s been month already since he arrived in Taiwan » By paying attention to some new data at the syntax/semantics interface, I will show that there exists a third pattern, noted (c), as in (5). In (5) the verb must be aspectually marked and cannot be copied, as shown in the comparison between (5) and (6)-(7). (5) ta da-sui-le nei kuai boli liang tian le (pattern c) (6) *ta da-sui nei kuai boli liang tian le (7) *ta da-sui nei kuai boli da-sui-le liang tian le « it's been two days since he broke that glass » In sum, the syntax of aspect markers cannot explained in syntactic terms only. Semantic considerations must be called for.

Nadiya Kirnosova: Measure Words in Chinese: Psychological Interpretation

The presentation is intended to consider the hypothesis that measure words in Chinese can be regarded as a reflection of a psychological process of number conception in people’s mind. The evolution of measure words in Chinese can be divided into three stages, which correlate with the three stages of number conception pointed out by J. Piaget. As the number conception is tightly related to conceptual development of classes, the report also covers the issue of the way Chinese people categorize the world which is traditionally connected with measure words in Chinese (as they are also regarded as classifiers). Firstly, using numerals without measure words in Archaic Chinese can be considered as a reflection of the first stage of psychological development, when people did not have factual number conception, but understood the quantity in general; and using Nouns after Numerals at that time can be seen as a reflection of perception domination in categorizing the world, when only general classes could be determined. Secondly, a great number of nascent measure words in Classical Chinese can be evidence of the second stage of psychological development, when factual number conception occurred, but still remained reversible, i.e. linked to visible reality. This can be proved by the fact that first measure words derived from names of parts of things. Finally, the appearance of a versatile measure word 个 at the third stage of measure words class evolution in Chinese can be considered as a reflection of stage of psychological development, when factual number conception definitively developed as well as a conception of class. Moreover, human mind mastered both: the operation of abstraction from all peculiar features of things and the operation of combining specific features with general ones simultaneously.

Hui-ju Hsiung: The Presence and Absence of the Prepositions in Chinese

A preposition describes a relationship between its object and another word in the sentence. According to the dependency relation between words, the relation between a preposition and its object in a prepositional phrase are bilateral dependence (Van Valin 2001). That is, the occurrence of each element is dependent upon the occurrence of the other. However, the Chinese prepositions are not always present in prepositional phrases. When a preposition does not occur in a prepositional phrase, the sentence may or may not change the meaning. And sometimes the sentence has to change the word order in order to maintain the grammaticality. The goal of this paper is to study the presence and absence of the prepositions in Chinese. We conclude four types of structures for the occurrence of the prepositions:

1. The prepositions must be present.

(1)a. Ta wang yuanzi po le yi tong shui. “She poured a bucket of water into the yard.”

b. *Ta △ yuanzi po le yi tong shui. “She poured a bucket of water (into) the yard.”

2. The prepositions may be present or absent, and both the sentence meaning and the word order will not be changed.

(2)a. Cong zheli dao chezhan zhi yao wu fenzhong. "It takes only five minutes from here to the station.”

b. △ zheli dao chezhan zhi yao wu fenzhong. "It takes only five minutes (from) here to the station.”

3. The preposition can be omitted, but the sentence meaning will be changed.

(3)a. Ta yao xiang xinlang jingjiu. “He wants to drink a toast to the groom.”

b. Ta yao △ xinlang jingjiu. “He asks the groom to drink a toast.”

4. The preposition can be omitted, but the word order has to be changed.

(4)a. Ta yi ge ren ba niunai he guang le. “He drank all the milk himself.”

b. Niunai ta yi ge ren he guang le. “He drank all the milk himself.”

Note: this is a preliminary version of the conference programme and is subject to changes.

Last update: July 17, 2010, 11:43 EET