Morphological Changes of Chinese Under the Influence of Language Contact: The Usages of Suffix <i>–men </i>Before and After the May Fourth Movement and Its Current Usages

Ye He; Yong Zhong; Xinmei Jiang; Donald Winford

doi:doi:10.11648/j.ijll.20231104.15

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Morphological Changes of Chinese Under the Influence of Language Contact: The Usages of Suffix –men Before and After the May Fourth Movement and Its Current Usages

Ye He, Yong Zhong, Xinmei Jiang, Donald Winford

Published in International Journal of Language and Linguistics (Volume 11, Issue 4)

Received: 12 June 2023 Accepted: 3 July 2023 Published: 31 July 2023

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Abstract

The study examines the diachronic changes during the May Fourth Movement and synchronic variation of the current use of the suffix -men, based on data from two corpora, Center for Chinese Linguistics (CCL) and Text of Recent Chinese (TorCH). Investigation in CCL shows that the suffix -men had already been used as a plural marker of human nouns in Qing Dynasty, while the usage of the suffix -men spreads from human to non-human nouns after the May Fourth Movement. Meanwhile, the prosodic and semantic constraints on the use of the suffix -men with human nouns have also been greatly relaxed. Investigation of the TorCH corpus reveals information on the current usage of suffix -men: the constraints on the usage of the suffix -men after human nouns and nonhuman nouns have been further loosened and the distribution of -men in discourse genres varies from a higher frequency of –men in prose and fiction to a lower frequency in scholarly literature. In the case of the development of -men since the May Fourth Movement, I argue the change is due to the type of borrowing referred to as frequential copying under the framework of code-copying. Code-internal factor of the use of -men as a plural marker in Chinese before May Fourth Movement is a prerequisite of copying, and the extra-linguistic factors, that is, the language ideology of improving Baihua through copying the grammar of Indo-European languages after the May Fourth and the increasing use of English since the adoption of opening-up policy, have greatly stimulated the copying of the plural marker from model code onto basic code.

Published in	International Journal of Language and Linguistics (Volume 11, Issue 4)
DOI	10.11648/j.ijll.20231104.15
Page(s)	126-135
Creative Commons	This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright	Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Science Publishing Group

Keywords

Suffix -men, Language Contact, Explicit Marker of Plurality, Language Ideology

References

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[14]	Wang Li. (1943). Grammar of Modern Chinese. Beijing: The Commercial Press.
[15]	Linguistics Department, Beijing Normal University. (1959). The change and development of Chinese written language since the May Fourth Movement. Beijing: the Commercial Press.
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[17]	Guo Hongjie. (2005). The cognitive perspective study on the influence of English on Modern Chinese. Shanghai: Shanghai Jiaotong University Press.
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[21]	Chen Guanglei. (1987). About –men and –s. Journal of Fudan University. 5, 30-34.
[22]	Xu Dan. (2011). The plural marker –men of the nonhuman noun in the dialects of He Zhou and the neighboring areas. Contemporary Linguistics. 6, 9-22.
[23]	Si Guo. (2001). Translation Studies. Beijing: China Translation and Publishing Corporation.

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Ye He, Yong Zhong, Xinmei Jiang, Donald Winford. (2023). Morphological Changes of Chinese Under the Influence of Language Contact: The Usages of Suffix –men Before and After the May Fourth Movement and Its Current Usages. International Journal of Language and Linguistics, 11(4), 126-135. https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijll.20231104.15

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ACS Style

Ye He; Yong Zhong; Xinmei Jiang; Donald Winford. Morphological Changes of Chinese Under the Influence of Language Contact: The Usages of Suffix –men Before and After the May Fourth Movement and Its Current Usages. Int. J. Lang. Linguist. 2023, 11(4), 126-135. doi: 10.11648/j.ijll.20231104.15

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AMA Style

Ye He, Yong Zhong, Xinmei Jiang, Donald Winford. Morphological Changes of Chinese Under the Influence of Language Contact: The Usages of Suffix –men Before and After the May Fourth Movement and Its Current Usages. Int J Lang Linguist. 2023;11(4):126-135. doi: 10.11648/j.ijll.20231104.15

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@article{10.11648/j.ijll.20231104.15,
  author = {Ye He and Yong Zhong and Xinmei Jiang and Donald Winford},
  title = {Morphological Changes of Chinese Under the Influence of Language Contact: The Usages of Suffix –men Before and After the May Fourth Movement and Its Current Usages},
  journal = {International Journal of Language and Linguistics},
  volume = {11},
  number = {4},
  pages = {126-135},
  doi = {10.11648/j.ijll.20231104.15},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijll.20231104.15},
  eprint = {https://article.sciencepublishinggroup.com/pdf/10.11648.j.ijll.20231104.15},
  abstract = {The study examines the diachronic changes during the May Fourth Movement and synchronic variation of the current use of the suffix -men, based on data from two corpora, Center for Chinese Linguistics (CCL) and Text of Recent Chinese (TorCH). Investigation in CCL shows that the suffix -men had already been used as a plural marker of human nouns in Qing Dynasty, while the usage of the suffix -men spreads from human to non-human nouns after the May Fourth Movement. Meanwhile, the prosodic and semantic constraints on the use of the suffix -men with human nouns have also been greatly relaxed. Investigation of the TorCH corpus reveals information on the current usage of suffix -men: the constraints on the usage of the suffix -men after human nouns and nonhuman nouns have been further loosened and the distribution of -men in discourse genres varies from a higher frequency of –men in prose and fiction to a lower frequency in scholarly literature. In the case of the development of -men since the May Fourth Movement, I argue the change is due to the type of borrowing referred to as frequential copying under the framework of code-copying. Code-internal factor of the use of -men as a plural marker in Chinese before May Fourth Movement is a prerequisite of copying, and the extra-linguistic factors, that is, the language ideology of improving Baihua through copying the grammar of Indo-European languages after the May Fourth and the increasing use of English since the adoption of opening-up policy, have greatly stimulated the copying of the plural marker from model code onto basic code.},
 year = {2023}
}

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TY  - JOUR
T1  - Morphological Changes of Chinese Under the Influence of Language Contact: The Usages of Suffix –men Before and After the May Fourth Movement and Its Current Usages
AU  - Ye He
AU  - Yong Zhong
AU  - Xinmei Jiang
AU  - Donald Winford
Y1  - 2023/07/31
PY  - 2023
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DO  - 10.11648/j.ijll.20231104.15
T2  - International Journal of Language and Linguistics
JF  - International Journal of Language and Linguistics
JO  - International Journal of Language and Linguistics
SP  - 126
EP  - 135
PB  - Science Publishing Group
SN  - 2330-0221
UR  - https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijll.20231104.15
AB  - The study examines the diachronic changes during the May Fourth Movement and synchronic variation of the current use of the suffix -men, based on data from two corpora, Center for Chinese Linguistics (CCL) and Text of Recent Chinese (TorCH). Investigation in CCL shows that the suffix -men had already been used as a plural marker of human nouns in Qing Dynasty, while the usage of the suffix -men spreads from human to non-human nouns after the May Fourth Movement. Meanwhile, the prosodic and semantic constraints on the use of the suffix -men with human nouns have also been greatly relaxed. Investigation of the TorCH corpus reveals information on the current usage of suffix -men: the constraints on the usage of the suffix -men after human nouns and nonhuman nouns have been further loosened and the distribution of -men in discourse genres varies from a higher frequency of –men in prose and fiction to a lower frequency in scholarly literature. In the case of the development of -men since the May Fourth Movement, I argue the change is due to the type of borrowing referred to as frequential copying under the framework of code-copying. Code-internal factor of the use of -men as a plural marker in Chinese before May Fourth Movement is a prerequisite of copying, and the extra-linguistic factors, that is, the language ideology of improving Baihua through copying the grammar of Indo-European languages after the May Fourth and the increasing use of English since the adoption of opening-up policy, have greatly stimulated the copying of the plural marker from model code onto basic code.
VL  - 11
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Author Information

Ye He

College of Foreign Languages, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China
Yong Zhong

College of Foreign Languages, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China
Xinmei Jiang

School of Chinese Ethnic Minority Languages and Literatures, Minzu University of China, Beijing, China
Donald Winford

Linguistics Department, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA

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APA Style

Ye He, Yong Zhong, Xinmei Jiang, Donald Winford. (2023). Morphological Changes of Chinese Under the Influence of Language Contact: The Usages of Suffix –men Before and After the May Fourth Movement and Its Current Usages. International Journal of Language and Linguistics, 11(4), 126-135. https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijll.20231104.15

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ACS Style

Ye He; Yong Zhong; Xinmei Jiang; Donald Winford. Morphological Changes of Chinese Under the Influence of Language Contact: The Usages of Suffix –men Before and After the May Fourth Movement and Its Current Usages. Int. J. Lang. Linguist. 2023, 11(4), 126-135. doi: 10.11648/j.ijll.20231104.15

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AMA Style

Ye He, Yong Zhong, Xinmei Jiang, Donald Winford. Morphological Changes of Chinese Under the Influence of Language Contact: The Usages of Suffix –men Before and After the May Fourth Movement and Its Current Usages. Int J Lang Linguist. 2023;11(4):126-135. doi: 10.11648/j.ijll.20231104.15

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@article{10.11648/j.ijll.20231104.15,
  author = {Ye He and Yong Zhong and Xinmei Jiang and Donald Winford},
  title = {Morphological Changes of Chinese Under the Influence of Language Contact: The Usages of Suffix –men Before and After the May Fourth Movement and Its Current Usages},
  journal = {International Journal of Language and Linguistics},
  volume = {11},
  number = {4},
  pages = {126-135},
  doi = {10.11648/j.ijll.20231104.15},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijll.20231104.15},
  eprint = {https://article.sciencepublishinggroup.com/pdf/10.11648.j.ijll.20231104.15},
  abstract = {The study examines the diachronic changes during the May Fourth Movement and synchronic variation of the current use of the suffix -men, based on data from two corpora, Center for Chinese Linguistics (CCL) and Text of Recent Chinese (TorCH). Investigation in CCL shows that the suffix -men had already been used as a plural marker of human nouns in Qing Dynasty, while the usage of the suffix -men spreads from human to non-human nouns after the May Fourth Movement. Meanwhile, the prosodic and semantic constraints on the use of the suffix -men with human nouns have also been greatly relaxed. Investigation of the TorCH corpus reveals information on the current usage of suffix -men: the constraints on the usage of the suffix -men after human nouns and nonhuman nouns have been further loosened and the distribution of -men in discourse genres varies from a higher frequency of –men in prose and fiction to a lower frequency in scholarly literature. In the case of the development of -men since the May Fourth Movement, I argue the change is due to the type of borrowing referred to as frequential copying under the framework of code-copying. Code-internal factor of the use of -men as a plural marker in Chinese before May Fourth Movement is a prerequisite of copying, and the extra-linguistic factors, that is, the language ideology of improving Baihua through copying the grammar of Indo-European languages after the May Fourth and the increasing use of English since the adoption of opening-up policy, have greatly stimulated the copying of the plural marker from model code onto basic code.},
 year = {2023}
}

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TY  - JOUR
T1  - Morphological Changes of Chinese Under the Influence of Language Contact: The Usages of Suffix –men Before and After the May Fourth Movement and Its Current Usages
AU  - Ye He
AU  - Yong Zhong
AU  - Xinmei Jiang
AU  - Donald Winford
Y1  - 2023/07/31
PY  - 2023
N1  - https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijll.20231104.15
DO  - 10.11648/j.ijll.20231104.15
T2  - International Journal of Language and Linguistics
JF  - International Journal of Language and Linguistics
JO  - International Journal of Language and Linguistics
SP  - 126
EP  - 135
PB  - Science Publishing Group
SN  - 2330-0221
UR  - https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ijll.20231104.15
AB  - The study examines the diachronic changes during the May Fourth Movement and synchronic variation of the current use of the suffix -men, based on data from two corpora, Center for Chinese Linguistics (CCL) and Text of Recent Chinese (TorCH). Investigation in CCL shows that the suffix -men had already been used as a plural marker of human nouns in Qing Dynasty, while the usage of the suffix -men spreads from human to non-human nouns after the May Fourth Movement. Meanwhile, the prosodic and semantic constraints on the use of the suffix -men with human nouns have also been greatly relaxed. Investigation of the TorCH corpus reveals information on the current usage of suffix -men: the constraints on the usage of the suffix -men after human nouns and nonhuman nouns have been further loosened and the distribution of -men in discourse genres varies from a higher frequency of –men in prose and fiction to a lower frequency in scholarly literature. In the case of the development of -men since the May Fourth Movement, I argue the change is due to the type of borrowing referred to as frequential copying under the framework of code-copying. Code-internal factor of the use of -men as a plural marker in Chinese before May Fourth Movement is a prerequisite of copying, and the extra-linguistic factors, that is, the language ideology of improving Baihua through copying the grammar of Indo-European languages after the May Fourth and the increasing use of English since the adoption of opening-up policy, have greatly stimulated the copying of the plural marker from model code onto basic code.
VL  - 11
IS  - 4
ER  -

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