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GRAMMATICAL MORPHEMES AND THE PROBLEMS OF QUASI-AFFIXES IN CONTEMPORARY CHINESE

Авторы:
Город:
Москва
ВУЗ:
Дата:
19 мая 2018г.

The main way of word-formation in Chinese is the composition of morphemes according to syntax rules. Word formation of international terminology also conforms to these rules. That's why my research starts from morphemes - the smallest semantic units in a language. The entire Chinese multi-syllable vocabulary is made up of these units.

Depending on their grammatical functions, morphemes are divided into content morphemes with their own subject or predicative reference, and grammatical morphemes with relational grammatical meaning.

Morpheme-by-morpheme translation based on analogy between the structure of a Chinese word and its foreign language original has both its  advantages and disadvantages. The following type of analogy can be observed: if in the source word prefix is in the front position, and suffix is after the stem, then when translating, we try to keep their positions relative to the stem (i.e., prefix remains in front of the stem, suffix remains behind it). This phenomenon abounds, that's why  to some degree it can be considered as  a rule of translating international terminology. The reason for this kind of positioning however differs in Chinese and in the source term: prefix and stem in Chinese have syntactic relations, whereas in European languages they are connected according to morphotactic rules.

The standard methods of translating international terminology have acquired an independent life in the Chinese language and now they are used for forming national terminology, which moves to the spoken language lexicon.

A lot of research is being done on Contemporary Chinese word formation, and there are many monographs devoted to this particular topic. The monographs written by Semenas A., Khmamatova A., etc. investigate the semantic problems of the so-called new affixes. Another substantial part of the research is dedicated to the new morphemes that haven't been studied before (e.g.:租[zu], 台[tai], etc.). Worth mentioning is also the research of Tsykin V., who considers quasi-affixation to be a special, independent lexico-morphological way of word formation.

Among Chinese linguists, Zeng Liying, Wang Li, Cheng Weilin, Lu Shuxian, Zhao Yuanren, etc. should be noted. Besides the individual authors, many collaborative projects on the quasi-affixes issues have been published, e.g.    those of Beijing University and Taiwan Academia Sinica, to name a few. Lists of morphemes, which appear as suffixes and prefixes are created on the basis of a large language corpus (always more than 100 000 signs).

It should be noted that the functions of grammatical morphemes and the problems of quasi-affixes have not been covered exhaustively by neither Chinese nor global sinology. Content suffixes and prefixes are carefully described, whereas grammatical morphemes are not sufficiently analyzed - no particular attention is paid to details, despite the frequent usage of the grammatical words. Most word-forming affixes in Contemporary Chinese have developed from content words. Affixes like 啊[a] and 第 [di] (prefix for ordinal numbers) are real suffixes - all Chinese linguists agree on that. I too subscribe to that point of view.

So far no distinct criteria for differentiation of quasi-affixes and content morphemes, on the one hand, and affixes, on the other, have been formulated. Chinese linguists use the following criteria to sort out Chinese morphemes: productivity (frequency of morpheme's occurrence in texts), localization (location of an affix relative to stem), semantic characterisitic (meaning of the affix), semantic grammaticalization (the extend to which the affix has diverged from the original meaning of the content morpheme as well as the possibility of the morpheme to act as an independent word. Due to this reason the total amount of the affixes always differs in different research.

Researchers agree that word-forming quasi-affixes in Contemporary Chinese have evolved from content words. Being a derivative of an initial content morpheme, quasi-affix preserves etymological relation to that morpheme. Quasi-affixes usually form rows of words, entering a wide semantic category (person, subject, process, etc.), and are marked by rather a high productivity. Quasi-affixes usually form derivatives with a particular grammatical meaning.

Statistical data is a helper in this type of research. Various studies on quasi-affixes register the following morphemes: 不 [bù] (126 occurrences in Standard Dictionary of Modern Chinese “现代汉语规范词典”, henceforth abbreviated as SDMC), 非[fēi] (19 occurrences in SDMC), 为[wéi] (15 occurrences in SDMC), 未[ wèi ] (31 occurrences in SDMC), 已 [] (13 occurrences in SDMC), 相 [xiāng] (89 occurrences in SDMC), 自[ ] (165 occurrences in SDMC). In studies based on The Dictionary of Contemporary Chinese, Renmin Ribao newspaper, “Information Grammar of Chinese” [Zeng, 2009], etc., the value of morphemes, such as 不 [bu] and非 [fei] is especially high, since they play an important functional role in making up morphological antonyms. The frequency of 未 [wei] is lower, but it should be noted that it is contrasted with such morphemes as 已 [yi] and 离[li]: 未婚[weihun],已婚[yihun],离婚[lihun] (‘single’, ‘married’, ‘divorced’ respectively).

Besides that other grammatical forms, such as ''reciprocity'', ''approach, come together'', etc. are made up in some cases (相帮[xiangbang] – mutual aid, 相爱[xiang’ai] – mutual love, 相交[xiangjiao] – become friends).

Terms with negations penetrate into the spoken language, but some Chinese linguists do oppose to that. Zeng Liying (2011) suggests that these morphemes should not be considered negations, but words that are artificially lowered to the level of word-forming morphemes, and thus grammatically act as morphemes in word-formation (the same is the case with the morphemes 超 [chāo] and 反 [fǎn]). On this issue Zeng Liying lacks linguistic horizons failing to understand that there are content morphemes, which can be used both as a word and as a part of a word (both Jan Baudouin de  Courtenay and Leonard Bloomfield conducted relevant studies), that  is Zeng Liying considers these morphemes as roots of words, which have real meaning, not as grammatized affixes. His study on the morpheme 非[fēi] based on Information Grammar and Renmin ribao newspaper obtained the following statistical data: from the total of 229 segments, containing 非[fēi], 157 were located at the beginning of the word, 48 - at the end of the word, and 24 - in the middle. In my own research (based on the SDMC) I have marked out 19 words containing the morpheme 非[fēi] as a prefix, 18 out of the 19 are two-syllable words, and 1 is a three-syllable word.

The disagreement among the researchers of Contemporary Chinese word-formation about the morpheme status of negations 不[bù] and 非 [fēi] is notable. Cao Wei suggests that the morpheme 不[bù] (不成词语素 [bùchéng cíyǔsù] and the morpheme 非 [fēi]   (非成词语素 [fēichéngcíyǔsù]) can both be considered as word-forming     morphemes (Chen, 2006). Zeng Liying however suggests that even though both morphemes are definitely functional, Chinese native speakers never consider negation 不[bù] as an affix.

This research cannot do without homonymy. If the morpheme 非[fēi] is located at the end of the word, then, usually, it is not a quasi-affix in such case it has the meaning of “非洲” [fēizhōu] ‘Africa’: 北非[běifēi] – Northern Africa, 中东非 [zhōngdōngfēi] – Central and Eastern Africa; or it takes part in idioms with the meaning “false”: 似是而非[sìshìérfēi] “seeming likelihood”, 是是非非[shì shìfēi fēi] “relatively just”, 若是生非[ruòshì shēng fēi “get into trouble”; or it forms such two-syllable words as 决非[jué fēi] “really without”, 莫非[mòfēi] «certainly….”; or it forms acronyms: 国转非[guózhuǎnfēi] – “privatization of enterprises”, 农转非[nóngzhuǎnfēi] – “agriculture”).

The process of transition of a content morpheme into a grammatical morpheme is called grammatization, or grammaticalization. The issue of grammatization of word-forming morphemes has been widely discussed in Chinese linguistics since 1980s. The timing concurred with the similar discussion on the theoretical problems of grammatization in Western linguistics. The latter showed that the source of grammatization is a content lexical unit, but the final result is a grammatical indicator, deprived of content meaning. This process however does not come to a theoretical completion in all the languages.

Grammaticalization is a gradual process. That is why it is possible to talk about degree of grammaticalization of content morphemes. Morphemes, which act as quasi­affixes, partially (and sometimes to a considerable extent) lose their initial content meaning and pass a certain route section on the way to a complete grammatization. Prosody of quasi-affixes is mostly reduced, right up to transition to a neutral tone.

The main application value of quasi-affixes and quasi-suffixes in Contemporary Chinese is automated processing of information in Chinese. Essentially, productivity of affixes and quasi-affixes in scientific language has raised a problem of morpheme-by­morpheme translation of Chinese multi-syllable terminology. To this day, the main way of automated processing of texts is their automated translation. The problem of forming a program for machine translation has changed its appearance and features, depending on technical feasibility of computers. Initially, the problem of processing lexis in a program for machine translation by separate morphemes was needed, as limited memory of the computers did not allow storing all the conjugates with different prefixes and suffixes. Then, when the technical issue of memory capacity was solved, a possibility of storing much more lexical information (including conjugates with different prefixes and suffixes) appeared. However, a program for morphological analysis of words has not lost its significance, as quasi-prefixes and quasi-suffixes are now used both for translating international terminology and creating Chinese terms proper, without corresponding foreign analogues.

If initially programs for machine translation were required due to the lack of computer memory capacity, later it became essential to have a program for morphological analysis of Chinese multi-syllable lexis in order to translate newly created terms on the basis of word-formation resources of Western terminology. That is ow regular publications on morpheme-by-morpheme processing  of Chinese terminology and different suggestions on its programming can be explained.

Based on my research I have come to the following conclusion when forming international terminology, functional words of two types are used, and then can come across in stems with different grammatical meaning. By semantics among functional morphemes, which have a word-forming function, there are negations 不[bù] and 非 [fēi] and functional words, indicating a way of realization of action or its phase sate. Negation 非[fēi] is used with stems having grammatical meaning of name and indicates absence of the referent indicated in the stem. In the case of stem with a predicative grammatical meaning, negation 不[bù] and functional words 未 [wei], 相 [xiāng] and 自[] are used. They indicate a way of realization of an appropriate indicator or its phase state.

Another conclusion of my research is that negation is productive, but is comprehended by neither native speakers nor linguists. The question remains: how can well-known negations turn into word-forming morphemes?

This concerns also morphemes such as 未[wei], 相[xiāng], 已[yi], 自[] etc. Their word-forming function is rather significant and it goes beyond borrowed terminology and gets into the spoken language. For instance, the word for atypical pneumonia is 非典[fēidiǎn] is an acronym of the term 非典型性肺炎[fēidiǎn xíngxìng fèiyán], thus a morpheme from scientific language has penetrated into the spoken language in a reduced 2 syllable version.

Modern lists of quasi-affixes include all seven functional morphemes studied in my paper. The fact that they are taken into consideration in all the lists indicates that they are an important part of the category of Contemporary Chinese quasi-affixes, and that they have become mandatory for both theoretical research and teaching practice.

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