Chapter 2: Typological Description

Typology: The study of the structural similarities and differences between languages.

Question: What type of language does Chinese belong to?

Views from the four parameters:

  1. Why is Mandarin regarded as an isolating language?

Isolating language: a language in which word forms do not change ( not inflected), and in which grammatical functions are shown by word order and the use of function words.

Grammatical function: the relationship that a word in a sentence has with the other words.

1.1.Morphemes that Mandarin do not have

  1. Case markers
  2. Number markers
  3. Agreement markers
  4. Tense markers
  1. Monosyllabicity: The number of syllables per word.

Question: Is Mandarin monosyllabic?

Ans: No, according to Li & Thompson, because of the following 3 reasons.

  1. Syntactically and semantically a great number of words must be treated as a single unit.
  1. In teaching and the examples used in dictionary, compound words are all regarded as a single unit.
  1. From the view of historical change, Mandarin is no longer a monosyllabic language.

Phonological change most extensively

↗ ↓

Classical Chinese (monosyllabic) Mandarin

↘Phonological change less extensively

↓

southern dialects

3. Topic Prominence: Chinese is a Topic-prominent language since sentences with topic-comment structure are a usual sentence type in Chinese. English is a Subject-prominent language since sentences with subject-predicate are a usual type in English.

4. Word order: the arrangement of words in a sentence.

Three basic word order types (Greenberg, 1965): VSO, SVO, SOV

In 402 languages, the distribution of word order type is as follows (Tomlin, 1986).

SOV → 180

SVO → 168

VSO → 37

VOS → 12

OVS → 5

OSV → 0

Greenberg’s word order correlation:

  1. VO → noun or verb ＋modifier
  2. OV → modifier ＋noun or verb

Word order in Mandarin

  1. Structurally the definition of subject is not clear.
  2. The word order is dependent on the meaning rather than the grammatical relation.
  3. Violation of Greenberg’s word order correlation.

The meanings in preverbal and postverbal positions

Preverbal Postverbal

Time punctual time durative time

Location action result of the action

5. Conclusion

Mandarin can be treated as an isolating language

a non-monosyllabic language

a topic prominent language

has indefinite word order