Corpus Analysis of Reduplication in Mandarin Chinese

• Main Authors: Chen Yun-chai, 陳雲釵
• Other Authors: Chuang Yuang-shan
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2001
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/84407147430898083148

碩士 === 國立高雄師範大學 === 英語學系 === 89 === This research firstly focused on analyzing the frequency distributions of the lexical patterns of the reduplicatives with the forms of AAB, ABB, AABB, and ABAB respectively found in the old and new corpora in Mandarin Chinese. Secondly, it examined the frequency distributions of syntactic categories in the reduplicatives with the forms of AAB, ABB, AABB, and ABAB in the old and new corpora in Mandarin Chinese. The old corpora were from the Corpus by the Mandarin Chinese Promotion Council and the new corpora were from the Sinica Corpus. As corpus linguistics has been widely used as an approach to doing researches in linguistics, it is efficient to compile corpora and analyze the data by computers. Here, the corpus linguistic approach was used to examine the differences in the distributions of the reduplicatives with the forms of AAB, ABB, AABB and ABAB respectively between the old and new corpora. Furthermore, it was to explore the differences in the distributions of the syntactic categories in the reduplicatives in terms of their forms: AAB, ABB, AABB and ABAB. The inferential statistics showed that there are significant differences in the distributions of the four kinds of reduplicatives and in those of the three kinds of syntactic categories, adjectives, verbs, and nouns, in the reduplicatives with the forms of AAB, ABB, AABB and ABAB between the old and new corpora. There were seven research hypotheses for answering three research questions. One statistical procedure was processed and two research corpora were compiled to answer to the first two questions. The statistical procedure was the Chi-square test and the two corpora were collected from the Sinica Corpus and the Chinese Dictionary web site. The research results are outlined in the following section from the first to the sixth hypotheses in regard with the differences in lexical categories. Firstly, take sample sizes into consideration. The Sinica Corpus is composed of 5,000,000 words but the Chinese Dictionary corpus only consists of 160,000 words. However, the occurrences of old and new reduplicatives totally are 770 and 764 respectively. Old reduplicatives contain six more than new ones, which indicates that reduplicatives do not rapidly increase with time. Secondly, under the comparison of the number of each type of reduplicatives between the old and new corpora, it shows that the number of reduplicatives with AAB and ABAB form in the new corpus is more than that in the old corpus; reduplicatives with AABB form in the old corpus are more than that in the new; reduplicatives with the form of ABB have exactly the same amount both in the old and new corpora, which means that reduplicatives with the form of AAB and ABAB were added into the Mandarin Chinese language; reduplicatives with the form of AABB were lost to certain extent through the time; reduplicatives with the form of ABB still maintain its amount no matter if there were any changes among them. Thirdly, as for the overlap between the old and new corpora, ABB has the most proportion; AABB the second; AAB the fourth; ABAB the last. It indicates that reduplicatives with ABB form, diachronically speaking, do not change as much as those with ABAB form. Furthermore, the change of reduplicatives with AABB form is over the change of those with AAB form. Besides, the overlap number between the two corpora is 707, which shows that through the time, half of the reduplicatives were lost and half of them were created because the amount of old and new reduplicatives is 770 and 760 respectively. Thirdly, from Table 6 to Table 13, in new reduplicatives with AAB form, nouns occur the most among all the four syntactic categories; in new reduplicatives with ABB form, adjectives occur the most of the others; in new reduplicatives with AABB form, adjectives occur the most as well; in new reduplicatives with ABAB form, verbs occur the most of the four syntactic categories. As for the old reduplicatives with AAB form, nouns occur the most; ABB form, adjectives occur the most; AABB form, adjectives occur the most; ABAB form, there is no record. It is a sign that both in the old and new corpora, adjectives in the reduplicatives with ABB and AABB forms have the most general distribution among these four syntactic categories. In addition noun reduplicatives with the form of AAB have the most occurring both in the old and new corpora. However, verb reduplicatives with the form of ABAB have the most occurring of the four syntactic categories, whereas, ABAB reduplicatives in the old corpora have no record. On the other hand, as for their total regardless of the matter of time, it provides us with some information which is adjectives have the most occurring; nouns the second; verbs the third; adverbs the last. Fourthly, as for the first hypothesis, the test styles of the reduplicatives with the forms of AAB, ABB, AABB, and ABAB between the Old and New Corpora were significantly different. This result indicates that there might be a diachronic change between the old and modern Mandarin Chinese or there might be a tendency of losing reduplicatives diachronically. Fifthly, hypotheses two and three were tested with the significance test. The result indicates that there were significant differences in the lexical categories of adjective, verb, and adverb reduplicatives with the forms of AAB, ABB, AABB and ABAB and the there was significant difference in the lexical categories in the four syntactic categories among the reduplicatives in terms of AAB, ABB, AABB and ABAB forms in the old and new corpora. However, there is no significant difference in the lexical categories of noun reduplicatives with the forms of AAB, ABB, AABB and ABAB in the old and new corpora. The result illustrates that noun reduplicatives are more than the others through the time. Nevertheless, adjectives, verbs and adverbs are more changeable than nouns from the perspective of time. The last hypothesis was rendered to answer the question whether there were any diachronic changes in Mandarin Chinese. It was found that there were indeed diachronic changes in Mandarin Chinese. There were 120 AAB reduplicatives, 337 ABB reduplicatives, 112 AABB reduplicatives, and 67 ABAB reduplicatives added in Mandarin Chinese diachronically; there were 43 AAB reduplicatives, 328 reduplicatives, 188 reduplicatives, and none reduplicatives lost in Mandarin Chinese diachronically. It was found that ABB reduplicatives have the best ability of productivity but also the best ability of elimination from the Chinese language. AAB has the second place in the productivity ability; AABB the third; ABAB the last; on the contrast, AABB has the second place in the elimination ability; AAB the third; ABAB the last. The results of this research may benefit the teachers who teach Chinese as a first language and as a second or foreign language when they intend to do some further study on reduplicatives in the theoretical linguistic field and for the pedagogical purposes.