Chapter 1 Introduction
1.3 The organization of the current study
The current study aims to explore the processing of verb-object compound (VOC) in
Mandarin Chinese. First, the motivation and the overall introduction of current study are
stated in Chapter 1. In Chapter 2, literature related to the current study is illustrated. The
methodology is demonstrated in Chapter 3, which is followed by Chapter 4, the results of
the experiment. The discussion and conclusion are included in Chapters 5 and 6 respectively.
Finally, the references and appendices are provided at the end of the current study.
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Chapter 2
Literature review
In Chinese, compounding is no doubt the dominant approach to create various lexical
units. In this chapter, Chinese compound system and compounding mechanism are
introduced and classified first which is followed by the detailed account on the
characteristics of Chinese Verb-Object Compounds (VOC) in section 2.1. Experimental
account on explaining compound processing from both psycholinguistic perspective and
neurolinguistics perspective are illustrated in section 2.2 and section 2.3 respectively.
2.1 Traditional definition of compound composition
In this sub section, compound composition is illustrated from the theoretical linguistic
point of view. There are two parts in this section. Firstly, the definition and classification of
Chinese compounds are introduced. The characteristics of verb-object compound in
Mandarin are stated thereafter.
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2.1.1 An introduction to Chinese compound
Serving as background information for the current study, some basic issues about
Chinese compounds, such as what is the general definition of words and compounds? What
are the descriptive characteristics of compounds? What could the compounding process be?
are introduced in this section. In the accumulated literature, the definition of “word” in
Chinese is controversial (cf. Chao 1948, 1968; Kratochvil 1968; Li and Thompson 1981;
Tang 1989; Packard 2000). Nevertheless, according to the phonological structure of
syllables, Chinese words can be generally divided into two categories: monosyllabic and
polysyllabic. Basically, the monosyllabic word consists of one morpheme, such as shui 水
(water) and cu 醋 (vinegar), while the polysyllabic word is composed of two or more morphemes, such as ‘十字路口 shiziluko’ (intersection). There are also a few cases in
which polysyllabic words contain only one morpheme, such as ‘蘿蔔 luo bo’ (radish) and
‘馬拉松 malasong’ (marathon race). These one-morpheme polysyllabic words are typically
borrowed from other languages.
Owing to the fact that monosyllabic structures leads to a large number of monosyllabic
homophones in modern Chinese, in order to distinguish those homophones, word formation
consequently tends to become more and more polysyllabic and compounding therefore is a
good approach to make a lexeme polysyllabic. Nowadays, roughly two thirds of the basic
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lexical items of everyday Chinese are polysyllabic words (Lu 1965; Lieber 2009).
The formation of a compound has been an intriguing topic which attracts lots of
linguists to devote themselves into the studies related to compounds. Compounds are lexical
units yet are composed of two or more linguistic parts without grammatical marks
expressing its inner structure and showing how the structure is obtained. In other words, the
relation between the components in a compound is not shown on the surface, e.g. 槍傷
qiang shang “gun wound”, the wound caused by the gun, 腿傷 tui shang “leg wound”, the
wound on the leg, and so forth. Moreover, the meaning of the compounds usually cannot be
obtained by decomposing its components, which became another reason why compound
formation has been under the spotlight for a long time.
Compounding is the dominant approach on creating new lexemes and the classification
of compounds varies among different linguists (citations). According to Tang (1989), there
are five major categories of compounds in Mandarin Chinese based on different internal
constructions of words:
(1) Subject-predicate construction: there is a syntactic subject-predicate
relationship between the components of a given compound. For example, the compound ‘tou tong 頭痛’ (headache) consists of the morpheme ‘頭 tou’ (head)
as the subject and the morpheme ‘痛 tong’ (ache) as the predicate.
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(2) Modifier-head construction: there exists a syntactic modifier-head relationship
between the components of a given compound. For example, the compound
‘dahong大紅’ (crimson) consists of the morpheme ‘大 da’ (big) as the modifier
and the morpheme ‘紅 hong’ (red) as the head.
(3) Coordinate construction: The antonymous or the synonymous relationship
between the components manifests on this kind of compound. For example, the compound ‘hei bai 黑白’ (black and white) consists of the morpheme ‘hei 黑’
(black) and the morpheme ‘bai 白’ (white), which is in an antonymous
relationship. The compound ‘dao lu 道路’(path and road) consists of the morpheme ‘dao 道’ (path) and the morpheme ‘lu 路’ (road), which is in a
synonymous relationship.
(4) Verb-complement construction: there exists a syntactic verb-complement
relationship between the components of a given compound. For example, the compound ‘shui bao 睡飽’ (to sleep till one is full) consists of the morpheme
‘睡 shui’ (to sleep), which can be considered the verb and the morpheme ‘飽
bao’ (full), which can be considered the complement.
(5) Verb-object construction: there is a syntactic verb-object relationship between
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the components of a given compound. For example, the compound ‘guan xin 關 心’ (worry) consists of the morpheme ‘關guan’ (close), which can be
considered the verb and the morpheme ‘心 xin’ (heart), which can be
considered the object.
The scope of this article is mainly focused on verb-object compounds (VOCs) as
illustrated in the 5th category above.
2.1.2 The characteristics of verb-object compound in Mandarin
A central issue on VOCs is whether to classify them as lexical units or as phrases, like
verb-object phrase (VOP). A group of researchers (Chao, 1968; Li & Thompson, 1983; Yi,
2007; Wang, 2009) contend that a VOC should be defined as a lexical unit. Li and
Thompson (1981) summarized three criteria on determining whether a VO structure is a
compound or not: (1) One or both of the constituents being bound morpheme, (2)
Idiomaticity of the meaning of the entire unit, and (3) Inseparability or limited separability
of the constituents. Although Li and Thompson’s criteria to certain degree are still valid,
they are unable to fully cover the diversity of VOCs, especially with regard to the following
two perspectives. First of all, it is generally agreed that a VOC’s meaning is “opaque”,
which cannot be derived by simply combining the meaning of its morphemes (e.g. chi cu 吃
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醋 “*eat vinegar”) while the meaning of a VOP is usually “transparent”; i.e., the meaning
can be derived by combining the meaning of its morphemes (e.g. chi mian 吃麵“eat noodles”). However, the “opaqueness” is not a simple dichotic classification (e.g. chi fan
吃飯 got both a transparent meaning “eat rice” and an opaque meaning “having a meal”;
kai men 開門 got both a transparent meaning “open the door” and an opaque meaning “start
running business”). Furthermore, while it is usually argued that a VOP can be freely
separated (e.g. chi le hao jiu dou chi bu wan de mian 吃了好久都吃不完的麵 “has been eating noodles for a long time but still cannot finish it”) and the interposing elements of a
VOC are limited (e.g. * chi le hao jiu dou chi bu wan de cu 吃了好久都吃不完的醋“has been being jealous for a long time but still cannot finish it”), it is unclear why fang le xin 放
了心“relived” is fine but *guan le xin *關了心 “worried” is not.
Focusing on the separability of constituents of a VOC, a group of scholars contends
that as long as a lexical unit can be separated or expanded, the lexical unit should be
classified as a phrase instead of a word (Lu, 1979; Paul, 1988; Sybesma, 1999). However, though this assumption can explain VOCs’ separability, it failed to account for VOCs’
limited separability compared with the unlimited separability in VOPs. Meanwhile, this
assumption fails to account for VOCs’ integral semantic meaning in separated form as well.
Since the two claims above cannot fully capture the characteristics of VOCs, a group
of researchers thus proposed that VOCs are words when the verbal and
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nominal/complement morphemes appear together, and are phrases when used separately
(Liu, 1967; Zhang, 2010). Along with this line, another group of researchers considered
VOCs are neither absolute word nor absolute phrase as well. They considered VOCs are in a
“middle-state” or transitional categories in morpho-syntax. Packard (2000) proposed that
the diversity of the VOCs can be explained in terms of the continuum of lexicalization, the
process of creating items out of syntactic units (Cabrera et al., 1998). The newly created
items usually lose their compositionality and acquire a new idiosyncratic content. The
separability of a VOC in this assumption thus depends on its position in the continuum of
the lexicalization. If a VOC is highly lexicalized, then it is unlikely to insert anything
between V and O (e.g.關心 guan xin “worry”, *關了心 guan le xin “worried”). On the
other hand, for the VOC which is still in the transition of lexicalization, the insertion will be
allowed ( fang xin 放心“feel relived”, fang le xin 放了心 “felt relived”). In this view, VOCs
can be considered a dynamic language phenomenon.
In sum, VOC is seemingly better accounted for in terms of the claims of “lexicalization”
and “unseparated = words, separated = phrases”. Actually, these two are assumptions which
most of the linguists agreed on when explaining VOC patterns (Liu,1967; Li&Tompson,
1989;Smith, 1999; Packard 2000 ; Chung, 2004; Fang, 2008 ; Zhang, 2010). Following
these assumptions, when used separately, a VOC is like a VOP. The main purpose of this
study is to find out whether such a view has psychological reality.
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2.2 Empirical accounts on compound composition
In the previous section, it seems that most linguists agreed to use lexicalization to
explain VOC patterns. However, there is still no consensus on the processing mechanism of
VOCs among psycholinguists. In other words, how people process VOC is still obscure. Are
we retrieving a unitary word representation out of our lexicon? Or do we comprehend a
VOC with a combinatory mechanism as in understanding a phrase?
In the field of psycholinguistics, the representation and processing of compound words,
and morphologically complex words more generally, remains a controversial issue. Much
psycholinguistic research has focused on the question whether morphologically complex
words are stored in the mental lexicon in their full form or whether only their morphemes
are stored and then combined to process complex word forms. The former idea is so-called
full-listing models (Butterworth, 1983; Bybee, 1995) and the latter view is termed
full-parsing models (Libben, Derwing, & de Almeida, 1999; Taft, 2004; Taft & Forster,
1976).
Alternatively, it is proposed by another group of researchers that both mechanisms may
be invoked, which is known as dual-route models (Gunter, & Friederici, 2003; Koester,
Gunter, & Wagner, 2004, 2007; Zwitserlood, 1994). In dual-route models, two routes of
processing are assumed. A complex word can either be stored completely or be decomposed
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into its morphological constituents (Baayen, Dijkstra, & Schreuder, 1997; Gunter, &
Friederici, 2003).
In order to decide among these models, many studies have been designed to explore
semantic decomposition of compounds in the auditory and visual modality (Coolen et al.
1993; Isel et al., 2003; Libben et al., 1999; Libben, 1993) with two variables being
manipulated: word frequency and semantic transparency.
It is conceivable that the frequency of the word mattered in compound processing since
more frequent words are more likely to benefit from readily available whole-form storage,
whereas less frequently used compounds might have to be processed through a
combinatorial mechanism. Semantic transparency is an influential factor on compound
processing as well. Since transparent compounds do not contain idiosyncratic meaning, they
do not need distinct lexical representations and consequently their processing mechanism
may be very similar with syntactic rules linking words in a sentence (e.g. blue+berry). On
the contrary, the meaning of opaque compounds cannot be derived by combining the
meaning of its constituents (e.g. straw+berry?) and thus may rely on whole-form lexical
storage. However, it should be noted that it is still controversial to contend that opaque
compound is accessed solely in a full-listing fashion, as illustrated below.
To explore whether the meanings of individual constituents are accessed during
compound processing or not, a number of behavioral studies are conducted with semantic
15
priming paradigms. It is shown that, regardless of the preceding prime being semantically
related to the first or second constituent of the target compound, the lexical decision times
to two-constituent transparent compound words were speeded up (Sandra, 1990;
Zwitserlood, 1994). Based on the result above, it is argued that combinatorial processing is
carried out for transparent compounds.
Trying to provide more evidence for the study above, a cross-modal priming study is
conducted by Zhou et al. (2000). In their study, the result showed that visually presented
transparent compound words were primed by the prior auditory presentation of both first
and second compound constituents, but the effect was absent for opaque compounds. In line
with these findings, another cross-modal semantic priming study showed that the prosodic
cue of the initial morpheme of a compound is able to assist the processing system in
activating a decompositional route at the offset of the morphemes (Isel et al., 2003). The
assistant effect only happened in compound words with a transparent head but not in
compound words with an opaque head.
However, in a lexical decision task using a repetition priming paradigm (Libben,
Gibson, Yoon, & Sandra, 2003), the result showed that the presentation of either the first or
second constituent as a lexical prime speeded up lexical decisions for both opaque and
transparent compounds. This implies that constituent access is activated for both transparent
and opaque compounds. Furthermore, in eye movement studies which directly compared
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processing of transparent and opaque compounds (frequencies of constituents and the
frequency of the whole-word forms were equal between the two types), no differences were
obtained on any eye movement measure for either English (Frisson, Niswander-Klement, &
Pollatsek, 2008) or Finnish (Pollatsek & Hyönä, 2005) stimuli. Again, the results suggest
that both transparent and opaque compounds adopt similar processing mechanism. More
interestingly, in a recent study conducted by Gagne et al. (2009), both transparent and
opaque compounds were processed more quickly than monomorphemic words, showing
that even the opaque compounds were processed more quickly than monomorphemic words
which again, indicated that lexical entries of constituents are accessed in compound
processing regardless of semantic transparency.
In sum, the behavioral studies under review are mostly conducted in terms of semantic
priming paradigm. Although the role of transparency in compound processing is still under
debate, the above studies generally report decomposition effects, which are in accordance
with full-parsing and dual-route models but not with full-listing models.
Accessing to compound constituents has also been studied neurophysiologically in
recent years. Event-related potentials (ERPs), with the high temporal resolution, are a
suitable tool to investigate such fast psycholinguistic processes.
Before heading into the experiment review, N400 (Kutas&Hillyard, 1980) will be
briefly introduced here. The N400 response is a broad negative deflection of the ERP that
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starts 200–300 ms after a word has been presented auditorily or visually and peaks after
approximately 400 ms. This negative-going wave is usually largest over central and parietal
electrode sites, with slightly larger amplitude over the right hemisphere than over the left
hemisphere. The N400 is typically seen in response to violations of semantic expectancies.
The N400 is typically elicited in response to meaningful stimuli and thought to reflect
access or integration of conceptual information (Kutas & Federmeier, 2011). It is also
assumed that the N400 effect reflects the difficulty in integrating the local lexical semantics
into the sentence/ discourse representation (Van Berkum et al.,1999; Van Berkum, Brown,
Hagoort, & Zwitserlood, 2003) or the difficulty in lexical access (Kutas & Federmeier,
2000).
Studies on compounds are rather few, if studies on derivation and inflection morpheme
processing are excluded (e.g., Katz, 1991; Li et al., 1993; Carlisle, 2000; Myers, 2006).
However, studies on idioms or English verbal phrase can still provide neurophysiological
evidence for morphological decomposition or composition.
To begin with, there are two recent studies attempting to measure the combinatorial
process itself, using the N400 brain response as an index of lexico-semantic integration of
compound constituents (Koester et al., 2007; Zhang et al.2013). Koester et al. (2007) showed
that transparent compounds elicited a larger N400 than opaque compounds, suggesting a
combinatorial mechanism for transparent compounds (Koester et al., 2007). Another recent
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ERP study (Zhang et al.2013) aims to investigate the time course of Chinese idiom
comprehension and the effects of compositionality. In the study, Chinese idioms with varying
degrees of compositionality and non-idiomatic phrases, primed by their literal interpretations,
were visually presented to subjects for performing a semantic judgment task. The results
show a graded modulation of the N400 for the Chinese idioms, with stimuli with high
compositionality (e.g. ju jing hui shen 聚精會神 “concentrate one's attention and energy on”)
eliciting the smallest ERP effects and those with low compositionality (e.g. yao ya qie chi咬 牙切齒 “gnash the teeth in anger”) the largest. The result again supported that
compositionality may induce larger N400.
To summarize, it has been inferred that the processing of compounds, at least
transparent compounds, operates combinatorially. As for the opaque compound, the
evidence is still not enough to make the conclusion. When it comes to VOCs in Chinese,
which can be separated just like a verbal phrase but at the same time their meanings are
opaque, it seems that the situation is more complex. Although there is no present literature
to refer to, studies on English verbal phrases might be helpful because English verbal
phrases have similar patterns as Chinese VOCs.
Similar to Chinese VOCs’ controversy, there is a considerable linguistic debate on
whether verbal phrases (e.g., turn up, break down) are processed as two separate words
connected by a syntactic rule or whether they form a single lexical unit. The views differ on
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whether meaning (transparency vs. opacity) plays a role in determining their
syntactically-connected or lexical status. As linguistic arguments could not reach a
consensus, Cappelle et al. (2010) adopted megnetoencephalography (MEG) to address the
issue. By applying a multi-feature Mismatch Negativity (MMN) design with subjects
instructed to ignore speech stimuli, Cappelle et al. recorded magnetic brain responses to
particles (up, down) auditorily presented as infrequent “deviant” stimuli in the context of frequently occurring verb “standard” stimuli. Already at latencies below 200 ms, magnetic
brain responses were larger to particles appearing in existing phrasal verbs (e.g. rise up)
than to particles appearing in non-existing combinations (e.g. *fall up), regardless of
whether particles carried a literal or metaphorical sense (e.g. rise up, heat up). Previous
research found that MMN is relatively enhanced if speech is linked to a single word, but
relatively reduced in the case of a syntactic and semantic match between two words linked
by phrase-structure rules (Pulvermüller & Shtyrov, 2003; Pulvermüller et al., 2008). The
increased brain activation to particles in real phrasal verbs reported in Cappelle et al.’s
study thus provided neurophysiological support that a congruent verb–particle sequence is
not in syntactic relationship but more like a lexical unit.
In short, according to the literatures in both psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics,
transparent compounds (i.e. similar to VOPs in Chinese) are processed with a
decomposition/integration mechanism. The larger N400 effect thus can be considered as the
20
cost of integration. On the other hand, the processing mechanism of opaque compounds (i.e.
similar to VOCs in Chinese) is still obscure.
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Chapter 3
Methodology
In this chapter, the current experiment is illustrated. First of all, the participants of the
experiment are described in section 3.1. Materials are introduced in section 3.2. Settings and
procedure of the experiment are reported in section 3.3. Finally, the process of data analysis
is illustrated in section 3.4
3.1 Participants
Thirty-nine Chinese native speakers (20 to 35 years old, mean age = 23, 25 females)
were recruited for the experiment. All participants were right-handed according to a
simplified version of the Edinburg handedness inventory (Oldfield, 1971). They all had
normal or corrected-to normal vision. None of the subjects had neurological/psychiatric
disorders. Written informed consent was obtained from all participants before the experiment
started. They were paid for their participation after they completed the task of experiment.
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3.2 Materials
The materials were sentences embedded with VO-structured verbs with two factors
being manipulated: transparency (Transparent, In between and Opaque) and sentence
pattern (Separated, Unseparated). They could be divided into six conditions: OS (opaque,
pattern (Separated, Unseparated). They could be divided into six conditions: OS (opaque,