2.4 Englishized Syntactic Structures
2.4.11 Pronoun before the antecedent
In traditional Chinese, antecedents always preceded pronouns (Wang, 1947;
Hsu, 1994); that is, unlike English which has both anaphoric reference and cataphoric reference, in Chinese cataphoric reference is not a usual norm (Liu, 1997; Chao and Shao, 2002).Wang (1994) even claimed that there was no use of cataphora in Chinese.
However, due to the influence of English translation, the use of cataphora appears in modern Chinese (Wang, 1947; Hsu, 1994), as illustrated in the following examples.
(35) 為了 他 的 名譽， 史可法 犧牲 了 他 的 生命。
weile ta de mingyu, shikefa xisheng le ta de shengming For he DE reputation, PN sacrifice PF he DE life
‗For his reputation, Shi ke fa sacrificed his life.‘ (Wang 1947: 374)
(36) 但 即使 宇宙 害 了 他，人 總 比 他 的 加害 者 還
‗But even if the universe hurts him, the man is still nobler than his perpetrators.‘
(Wang 1947: 376)
(37) > 別 人 是 嗜 茶 才 賞 壺，他 卻 因 愛 壺 而 學 bie ren shi shi cha cai shang hu, ta que yin ai hu er xue
Other man C/F adore tea only adore pot, he but because love pot and learn 喝 茶 這 是 竹北 市民 黃 XX 的 奇聞。
he cha zhe zhubei shimin huang X X de qiwen drink tea this C/F zhubei citizen Huang X X DE legend
‗Other people appreciate tea pots because of loving drinking tea, but he learns how to drink tea because of adoring tea pots, which is Huang X X‘s legend in Zhu Bei City.‘ (Wang 1947: 375)
However, the use of cataphoric pronouns is a rather marked expression not only in Chinese but also in English; that is, even in English the frequency of cataphoric use is much lower than the anaphoric use (Kennison et al. 2009). In other words, cataphoric device is a stylistic writing/speaking skill, and since it is rare in English as well, it is difficult to directly associate the use of cataphoric pronouns in Chinese with the English influence. Therefore, we will not include cataphoric pronoun as an
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Englishized use.
2.4.12 Prominal heads with adjective or adjective clauses
It is suggested that traditionally pronominal heads cannot be preceded by any modifier, while it can be found in modern Chinese now, such as (38) and (39) (Wang, 1947; Diao, 1999).
(38) 有 了 四千 年 吃 人 履歷 的 我 you le siqian nian chi ren luli de wo have PF four thousand year eat people resume DE I
‗I have four thousand years‘ experiences of eating people‘ (Wang 1947: 375) (39) 家境 富裕 的 他， 發現 陶製 茶壺 很 好 玩。
Jiajing fuyu de ta ，faxian taozhi chahu hen hao wan Family rich DE he, discover pottery-made tea pot very good play
‗He who from the wealthy family finds that pottery tea pot is a lot of fun.‘
(Hsu 1994: 103)
2.4.13 Position of the Speaker in Direct Quotations
Traditionally, the position of the speaker always occurs immediately before the quotation in Chinese. On the other hand, in English, the position of the speaker can be in the beginning, middle or end of the quotes. Due to the influence of English translations nowadays the traditional usage is even used less frequently than the Englishized use (Kubler, 1985a). In modern Mandarin the position of the speaker appears more often at the end of the quotation rather than at the beginning as a result of Englishization. An example of the post-positioning of the speaker in the direct quotation is shown below:
(40) >「你 為什麼 不 答應 我？」她 嗔怒 地 問到。
ni weisheme bu daying wo ta chennu de wendao You why NEG promise me ? She angry MAS ask
‗―Why don‘t you promise me?‖ she asked furiously.‘ (Kubler 1985: 108)
Though somewhat less commonly used, the position of the speaker in the middle of the sentence is also found in modern Chinese, see (41).
(41) >「為什麼 要 詛咒 我們？」覺民 闔 了 書 溫和 地 問，
weishemo yao zuzhou women juemin he le shu wenhe de wen, Why want curse we Juemin close PF book gentle MAS ask
「我們 和 你 一樣， 都是 在 這個 舊 家庭 裡 討 生活。」
Women han ni yiyang , doushi zai zhe ge jiu jiating li tao shenghuo We and you same, all at this old family inside beg life ‗―Why curse on us?‖ Jue Min closed the book and asked gentlely, ―We are the
same as you, earn the living in this old family.‖‘ (Kubler 1985: 110)
In short, in modern written Chinese, the position of the speaker in direct quotation is no longer restricted to the beginning of the quotation.
This Englishized pattern is derived from imitation of English writing. However, in conversation, if the speaker cited someone‘s words, to let the hearer understand who gave the quotes clearly, the name of the speaker is always in the beginning of the quotation, and thus this Englishized category may be specific to the writing. In other words, since we intend to examine the same categories in writing and speaking, this pattern may not be an ideal target pattern in speaking and hence this category will not be discussed in the present study.
2.4.14 前者…後者 Qianzhe…houzhe ‘the former…, the latter’
The phrase 前者…後者 qianzhe…houzhe is directly translated from English pattern ‗the former… the latter‘. Originally there was no such construction in Chinese, so the translators could not find any equivalent expression. Thus, they translate the pattern literally and use it as the English counterpart, such as (42) and (43) (Wang, 1947; Hsu, 1994).
(42) 示眾 描 寫 的 主要 對象 是 人，我 所 知道 的
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‗The main target which Shizhong describes is human, while ―The Cambridge I Know‖ is objects. The former is the anatomy of life; the later is the tribute to nature.‘ (Wang 1947: 375)
‗In market development, we have to focus on the U.S. and Europe markets, and the latter has more potentialilty than the former.‘ (Hsu 1994: 105)
2.4.15 Expansion of the Construction 可能 Keneng ‘May’
Wang (1947) proposed that originally 可 ke meant ‗allow‘ and without the meaning of ‗possibility‘. Part of Wang‘s claim is challenged by Peyraube‘s (1998, 2004) study of modal auxiliaries in Classical Chinese. Peyraube (1998, 2004) suggested that 可 ke carried the sense of ‗possibility‘ as 能 neng in Classical Chinese;
however, there was no occurrence of keneng at that time. Chao (1968) also mentioned that neng as equivalent to ‗can; be able to‘ in English and 可以 keyi as equivalent to
‗may‘ in the sense of permission. It is proposed that in modern Chinese, keneng is equivalent to the use of ‗may‘ in English, as in (44). In addition, nowadays keneng is widely and frequently used to express the meaning of ‗possibility‘, and even nominalized as in (45), as exemplified in the following.
(44) 他 很 可能 地 不 再 到 這裡 來 了。
Ta hen keneng de bu zai dao zheli lai le He very maybe MAS NEG again to here come PF
‗He may not come here anymore.‘ (Wang 1947: 338) (45) 中國 沒有 亡 國 的 可能。
zhongguo meiyou wang guo de keneng China NEG die nation NM possibility
‗There is no possibility for China to collapse.‘ (Wang 1947: 340)
However, after examining the novel ‗Dream of the Red Chamber‘ to further explore the use of keneng in traditional Chinese, it is found that there are five cases of keneng, as shown below.
(46) 你 大哥 和 珍兒 現 已 定案， 可 能 回 家﹖
Ni dage han zhener xian yi dingan, ke neng hui jia?
You big brother and PN now already decided, allow possibly go home
‗The case of your brother and zhener has been settled, can they go home?‘
(Dream of the Red Chamber)
In (46), though keneng still remains as two individual units rather than a single compound, it reveals that in the late 18th century, the co-occurrence of keneng started to emerge, and with more than one hundred years of development, it may be lexicalized as a fixed expression. This presumption is supported by Hsu‘s observation that the use of keneng ‗may‘ is so widespread that no one is aware of its foreign influence. In other words, the expansion of keneng may not be the result of Englishization but long-term development of keneng and thus will not be analyzed here.
2.4.16. The construction of 之一 Zhiyi ‘one of’
One more Englishized pattern introduced by Wang (1947) is 之一 zhiyi, which is directly translated from ‗one of‘ in English. Wang (1947) claimed that there was no such construction in traditional Chinese. Yu (2006) even commented that such a use is redundant and can be omitted. (47) is an example.
(47) 紅樓夢 是 中國 的 文學 的 名 著 之一
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Hongloumeng shi zhongguo de wenxue de ming zhu zhiyi Hongloumeng C/F PN DE literature DE fame write of one
‗The Dream of the Red Chamber is one of the famous writings in Chinese literature.‘ (Yu 2006: 9)
2.4.17 Pronouns in possessive and object position
Traditionally, in Chinese the possessive pronouns are dispensed with once the possessor is presumed to be obvious to the hearer (Chao, 1968), as illustrated below:
(48)他 戴上 (他的) 帽子 走 了 Ta dai shang (his) maozi zuo le He put on (he DE) hat walk PF
He put on his hat and left. (Chao 1968: 636)
However, in modern Chinese due to the influence of English translation, many possessive pronouns are expressed even when no contrastive function is intended, which actually can be omitted. For example:
(49) 除了 吃 飯 之外， 我 沒有 一 刻 停過 我的 筆。
Chule chi fan zhiwai, wo meiyou yi ke tingguo wode bi Except eat meal of out, I NEG one moment stop my pen
‗Except for having meals, I‘ve never stopped my pens any single moment.‘
(Hsu 1994: 107)
(50) 舅舅 的 雙手 已經 喪失 了 它們 的 一部份 的 Jiujiu de shuangshou yijing sangshi le tamen de yibufen de Uncle DE hands already lose PF they DE one part NM 靈活性 了
linghuoxing le flexibility PF
‗My uncle‘s hands have already lost part of their flexibility.‘ (Yu 2006: 40)
Therefore, just as the Englishized use of pronouns in the subject position, there are increasing uses of pronouns as possessives, and also as objects.
2.4.18 Lexical nominalization
There are different types of nominalization, like adjective and verb nominalization; however, the Englishized examples of this category in Hsu (1994) and Yu (2006) all belong to verbal nominalization. Diao (1999) proposed that verbs serving as nouns are rarely seen in traditional Chinese, while it is very common in modern Chinese due to the influence of European languages. Radovanovic (2001) also described verbal nominalization as Europeanization, since modern Indo-European languages are with productive nominalization. It is proposed that nominalized process is a realization of grammatical metaphor in European languages;
the form is altered, whereas the ideational meaning is the same, as exemplified by the words ‗announce‘ and ‗announcement‘ (Banks, 2005). In short, following the literature, the present study will focus on verbal nominalization.
There are two subtypes of Englishized nominalization introduced in the literature.
The first type is the nominalized verb as a subject or object in the sentence. Yu (2006) observed that in English abstract nouns or inanimate objects serving as a subject is very common, while in traditional Chinese a subject is usually an animate referent.
On the other hand, in modern Mandarin, an event or an action can serve as a sentence subject resulting from the English influence, and the verb of the event or action is nominalized so that the whole event or action can be a subject, such as (51). The example of verbal nominalization in the object position is shown in (52).
(51) 書籍 的 選購 只好 委託 你 了。
Shuji de xuangou zhihao weituo ni le Book NM purchase only entrust you PF
‗The purchase of books can only be entrusted by you.‘ (Yu 2006: 3) (52) 他們 杯葛 這 種 風俗 的 繼續。
Tamen beige zhe zhong fengsu de jixu
They deter this kind custom NM continuity
‗They deter the continuity of this kind of custom.‘ (Yu 2006: 3)
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Yu (2006) proposed another type of Englishized verbal nominalization; that is, the cases of ‗verb + abstract noun‘. Here, the verb is usually a ‗weak‘ or an ‗empty‘ verb, like 做出 zuochu ‗do; make‘ and 進行 jinxing ‗undergo‘, and we can find similar usage in English, like ‗make decisions‘. Yu (2006) defined a weak verb as a verb with a more general meaning used to refer to different kinds of actions. With the existence of a weak verb, the original verb is nominalized as an abstract noun and follows the weak verb, as shown in (53) and (54).
(53) 昨晚 的 聽眾 對 訪問 教授 做出 了 十分 熱烈 的 Zuowan de tingzhong dui fangwen jiaoshou zuochu le shifen relie de
Last night DE audience to visit professor do PF very fervent NM 反應。
fanying response
‗The audience gave the visiting professor very fervent response last night.‘ (Yu 2006: 4)
(54) 我們 對 國際 貿易 的 問題 已經 進行 了 研究。
Women dui guoji maoyi de wenti yijing jinxing le yanjiu We to international trade DE problem already conduct PF research
‗We have already conducted the research on the problem of international trade.‘
(Yu 2006:4)
2.4.19 Interim Summary
Table 1 summarizes the eighteen syntactic structures discussed in this chapter, providing a clear picture of the Englishized syntactic patterns which have been studied so far and listed in Hsu‘s study.
In the current research, the categorization of syntactic patterns is mainly based on Hsu‘s study, as her study includes the most complete Englishized syntactic categories.
Most importantly, since Hsu‘s study is the most recent study of Englishization of Taiwan Mandarin, it can be a direct reference for the current research. The total Englishized patterns examined in her study are eighteen categories, but as explicateed above, in the present study we deleted six of them, including increased use of the
copula 是 shi, 當 dang as a conjunction, 在 zai as preposition and auxiliary, pronouns before the antecedent, position of the speaker in direct quotations and expansion of the construction 可能 keneng ‗may‘. The remaining categories are integrated and recategorized into seven categories. The seven categories are as the following:
1. Pronouns: increasing use of subjects, inanimate third person pronouns and increasing use of possessives and objects.
2. Long pre-modifiers: modifying clauses with head nouns and pronominal heads with adjective or adjectival clauses.
3. Insertion of 一 yi and classifiers 4. Passive structure 被 bei
5. Lexical verbal nominalization
6. Concessive clauses in the final position
7. Other Englishized patterns: other prepositions (i.e. youguan, duiyu), zhiyi, qianzhe…houzhe.
Table 1. The Englishized syntactic patterns discussed in the literature (Wang, 1947;
Tsao, 1978; Kubler, 1985a; Hsu, 1994; Wang, 2002; He, 2004; Yu, 2006)
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2.5 Chapter Summary
In this chapter, we have reviewed the studies of language contact, which can be divided into two types, oral language contact and written language contact. The results of language contact can induce language change on phonology, morphology, semantics and even syntax. In terms of the Englishization of Chinese, it is chiefly through written language contact, and its influence can be found on the syntactic level.
Therefore, Englishization of Chinese supports the argument that language change can be mainly elicited by the written language contact. Also, it provides positive evidence toward the possibility of structural borrowing. With the abundant evidence from the diachronic and synchronic studies, the validity of the Englishization of Chinese on syntactic level is supported. However, the latest linguistic study of Englishization in Taiwan was more than 15 year ago, and due to the lift of martial law in 1988 the development in Taiwan in these 20 years is so rapid that even language use has been undergoing a lot of changes (Shih and Soong, 1998; Kuo, 2009; How, 2010). Based on this assumption, we will investigate the Englishization of current Taiwan Mandarin and compare it with the written data in 1988. In addition, as previous studies particularly focused on written Chinese, it would be interesting to observe the Englishzation in oral Mandarin and compare these two types of language modes.
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Chapter 3 Results and Discussion
This chapter explores the Englishized uses and structures in our database; the written data were collected from two magazines 天 下 Tienxia and 新 新 聞 Xinxinwen and the oral data were from four television talk shows 今晚誰當家 jinwan shei dangjia, 關鍵時刻 Guanjian shike, 夢想街 57 號 Mengxiangjie 57hao and 王牌大賤諜 Wangpai da jiandie. To have a more comprehensive discussion, section 3.1 first presents the comparison between the writing in 1988 and 2010 respectively. Section 3.2 discusses the results of oral data. 3.3 is the general discussion of the overall findings and analysis.
3.1 The Results of the Written Data in 1988 and 2010
In Chapter two, we have reviewed the literature on Englishized structures.
However, the statistical evidence in previous studies is not sufficient enough, and most Englishized constructions are without any quantitative supports of their occurrences. Therefore, to confirm that the Englishized phenomenon discussed by Hsu (1994) indeed existed at the time of her investigation, and more importantly to explore the development of Englishization on syntax during the last twenty years, we study and compare the written data in 1988 and 2010 respectively. Each of the seven Englishized structures is analyzed and discussed respectively below.
3.1.1 Pronouns
The Englishized uses of pronouns can be divided into the following categories:
increasing use of subjects, and increasing use of objects and possessives. The criteria of Englishization are derived from category 1, 4 and 17 by Hsu (1994) (cf. Table 1).
Since these three categories all result in increasing use of pronouns in modern Chinese, in the present study we classify them into the same category and then discuss
them respectively in section 3.1.1.1 and 3.1.1.2.
3.1.1.1 Increasing use of pronouns as subject
Traditionally, subject in Chinese can be omitted if the context is clear enough.
Take (55) as an example, in traditional Chinese ta should be omitted, since it can be understood from the context. In a word, if the pronominal subject is omittable then it is regarded as Englishized usage.
(55) > 例如 馬英九 日前 便 明確 表示，他 會 請 Liru mayingjiu riqian bian mingque biaoshi, ta hui qing For example PN recently LK clear show, he will invite 行政院 檢討 所有 法規、 文書、 軍歌
xingzhengyuan jiantao suoyou fagui, wenshu, jun ge administration bureau examine all regulations, papers, military songs
‗For example, Ma Ying-jeou recently has clearly expressed that he would ask the Administration Breau to review all regulations, papers, and military songs.‘
‗For example, Ma Ying-jeou recently has clearly expressed that he would ask the Administration Breau to review all regulations, papers, and military songs.‘