The paper shows that neither monosyllabic localizers nor disyllabic localizers in Mandarin are postpositions. More importantly, it argues that, contra previous uniform treatments of monosyllabic localizers as postpositions, clitics, or deviates of nouns, monosyllabic localizers in Mandarin in fact serve different functions in different contexts or constructions. Specifically, they can be used as a noun in at least a few limited contexts, as a root in a polymorphemic word, and as a clitic when attached to a full-fledged NP. The paper shows that disyllabic localizers serve similar functions though, unlike monosyllabic localizers, they can be used as regular nouns. The paper thus demonstrates that localizers, whether monosyllabic or disyllabic, can all be analyzed with crosslinguistic notions like "noun," "root," and "clitic." When monosyllabic and disyllabic localizers are used as nouns, they function as independent words. When they are a component of a polymorphemic word, they serve as a nominal root. When they function as a clitic, they are also nominal in nature.

This paper aims to probe into the semantic constraints that dictate the morphological make-ups of motion sequences. Given that Mandarin allows serial motion construction with multiple verbal morphemes, it is always an intriguing question as to how the morphemes are combined and ordered. To account for the allowed and disallowed sequences of prototypical motion verbs, three sequencing principles are proposed on par with the Proto-Motion Event Schema proposed in Liu et al. (2015). The proposed principles help to set the semantic boundary of a serial motion sequence (The Boundary-Setting Principle), rule out morphological combinations that are against the default order (the Non-Regressional Principle), and account for the prominence and characteristics of Path in motion predication (the Path-Delimiting Principle). As Path is an integral part of motion, it has to be properly delimited with a Path-delimiting element. These three principles may together account for the multi-morpheme motion sequences whose morphological structures are highly correlated with lexical semantic structures. By characterizing the semantic-to-morphological correlations, the study ultimately shows how morphosyntactic patterns are motivated and shaped by semantic and functional considerations in operation.

中国大陆目前通用的现行盲文本质上是一种音节盲文（或者称为拼音盲文），在盲文信息化和盲人识字方面表现出很多不足。本文旨在提出一种汉字盲文设计的框架结构以解决上述问题。汉字盲文基于现行盲文设计，利用现行盲文本身及在现行盲文前加标志位的方式定制盲文版汉字。这些标志位与汉字的偏旁相关联，不仅可以有效区分"同音字"，还可以表现汉字的意义。因此，汉字盲文虽然从"音节盲文"发展而来，但它突破了传统"音节盲文"的局限性，自成体系，在某种程度上有助于视力残疾人士更好的融入明眼人社会，也可以极大提高计算机汉字和盲文相互转换的效率。

Exegesis (Xungu 訓詁) is an important branch of classical Chinese philology. It is a discipline devoted to the explanation of characters and expressions in ancient Chinese texts. The emergence of Xungu can be traced back to Er ya 爾雅, a Pre-Qin dictionary. The Han-Tang period, which is the heyday of the discipline, witnessed the production of many important Xungu works, most of them appearing in the form of commentaries. They have then become the indispensable guides to subsequent readers of classical Chinese texts. Given the canonical importance of these ancient commentaries, it is not surprising to see that most modern philologists regard the explanations of ancient Chinese texts offered in these classical Xungu works as authoritative dictionary meanings and uncritically adopt them in their own works. To date, however, little work has thoroughly examined how these ancient Xungu scholars arrived at their judgments. This article remedies this gap by clarifying the working mechanism of these ancient Xungu scholars in annotating ancient texts. It argues that these ancient Xungu scholars, when explaining a character in an ancient text, would first and foremost compare that text with parallel texts from other textual sources to identify textual variants. If a difference in terms of word choice existed between the text they were commenting and other relevant parallel texts, they would often uncritically use the latter to provide glosses to the former, even if the two were obviously not synonyms or near-synonyms. This article then shows that subsequent important philologists such as Zhu Junsheng 朱駿聲 (1788–1858) and Hong Yixuan 洪頤煊 (1765–1837), unaware of this unique working mechanism of ancient Xungu scholars, anachronistically mistook the judgments offered in these ancient Xungu works, which were simply made on the basis of textual variants, to be true and accurate dictionary meanings. As a result, they unavoidably established unnecessary connection between the semantically unrelated textual variants and ended up creating mistakes of their own.

Reviewed by: Diversity in Sinitic Languages ed. by Hilary M. Chappell Bit-Chee KwokiD, corresponding author and Yik-Po LaiiD Diversity in Sinitic Languages. Edited by Hilary M. Chappell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xvii, 315. ISBN 9780198723790 1. OVERVIEW OF DIVERSITY OF SINITIC LANGUAGES The difference in grammar, or morphosyntax, among Chinese dialects was once thought to be insignificant, as reflected in Chao's (1968:13) famous claim that "[i]t is in matters of grammar that the greatest degree of uniformity is found among all the dialects of the Chinese language." This idea, however, has been critically challenged since the 1980s when more dialectal data come into light.1 Diversity in Sinitic Languages is the latest milestone in the exploration of the grammatical diversity across Chinese dialects. As the book title suggests, the editor views traditional Chinese dialect groups as related but different languages. The term 'Sinitic languages' will be used throughout this review. The book under review comprises three parts, bringing together ten chapters by eight authors. All the chapters, except Chapter 3 by Peyraube, are products of the project entitled 'The hybrid syntactic typology of Sinitic [End Page 432] languages (SINOTYPE)' funded by the European Research Council from 2009 to 2013. The final product of the project, following this book, will be a series of typological descriptive grammars of lesser-known Sinitic languages such as the Waxiang language spoken in Hunan, Hui'an Southern Min spoken in Fujian, and Nanning Southern Pinghua spoken in Guangxi.2 In Part I of the book, two chapters, following the introduction, are devoted to approaches to the grammatical diversity of Sinitic languages. To highlight the nature and extent of the diversity across the languages, Chappell's chapter applies the notion of linguistic area, which typically describes languages belonging to different families, to analyzing Sinitic languages. She identifies five linguistic areas based on an examination of disposal, passive and comparative constructions. Peyraube's chapter demonstrates with specific examples how typological research on Sinitic languages may benefit from studies of diachronic grammar. In contrast, in the West the influence of typology upon diachronic studies is more significant than that of diachronic studies upon typology. In Part II, extensive data were presented in three typological studies to illustrate important aspects of the grammatical diversity across Sinitic languages. Yujie Chen's study investigates demonstrative systems with a sample of 303 Sinitic languages. Chen shows that on top of the two-term systems, which are the most prevalent type in Sinitic languages as well as in world languages, there also exist one-term, three-term, four-term, and even five-term systems in the Sinitic family. Some languages with a one-term system are found to employ another type of system as well. In systems with three terms or above, a demonstrative member may be derived from another member through various devices, such as syllable lengthening, stressing, reduplication and tone sandhi. While different systems in the languages are mainly based on the distance scale, a small number of them are reported to be also sensitive to visibility. Wang revisits bare classifier phrases ([CL-N]; noun phrases made up of a classifier + noun without a numeral or demonstrative) with a sample of 120 Sinitic languages. Taking [End Page 433] into account the syntactic distribution (the possibility of preverbal use and postverbal use) and the semantic interpretation (the possibility of definite reading and indefinite reading) of the bare classifier phrases, Wang identifies a range of seven behavioral types from the 16 logical types produced by the four variables. Eventually he comes up with three implicational universals: (a) preverbal [CL-N] phrases ⊃ postverbal [CL-N] phrases; (b) preverbal indefinite [CL-N] phrases ⊃ preverbal definite [CL-N] phrases; and (c) postverbal definite [CL-N] phrases ⊃ postverbal indefinite [CL-N] phrases. Chappell and Peyraube co-author the last chapter of Part II, presenting a study of comparative constructions in Sinitic languages. The study focuses on the two main types of comparatives in the languages, the compare type with the marker-standard-predicate configuration and the surpass type with the predicate-marker-standard form. More specifically, the authors disagree with the common belief that the surpass type is...

In light of the high frequency of disyllabic words in modern Chinese and the “default” phonological status held by the disyllabic prosodic foot in speech production, we conducted a series of psycholinguistic experiments to determine whether the quantitative property of prosodic feet has a significant influence when parsing syntactically ambiguous utterances in speech perception. More specifically, without contextual or acoustic cues, would native Mandarin speakers be biased towards disyllabic structures when listening to six-syllable utterances that can be parsed into syntactically similar structures composed entirely of disyllabic or trisyllabic feet? Results indicate that, Mandarin speakers tend to parse ambiguous utterances initially into one of the two possible syntactic structures rather than simply recognizing them as ambiguous. Nonetheless, they do not favour disyllabic structures when lexical information regarding word meaning, syntactic function, usage frequency, etc. is available. However, when parsing sequences of six random digits where lexical and syntactic information is irrelevant, our results point to a clear preferential tendency towards disyllabic grouping. In other words, the quantitative property of prosodic feet plays a significant role in Mandarin speech parsing only when lexical and syntactic information is irrelevant or unavailable.

Resultative verb compounds (RVCs) in Mandarin appear in a V1-V2 sequence and have three major subtypes—result-state, directional and completive RVCs with different degrees of compositionality depending on the extent to which the compound’s meaning can be derived from the meanings of the component verbs. The derivation of the RVC has been analyzed as a lexical or syntactic process. Previous acquisition studies show that the RVC’s compositionality and event structure are not fully acquired before the age of three. Findings conflict on whether the acquisition process revealed by early RVCs is usage-based or rule-based. We examined longitudinal data from two Mandarin-speaking children and administered a novel verb experiment on 32 children. The lexicalist approach to RVC formation is a better account for our data than the syntactic approach. Our data lend support to rule-based learning of RVCs. Children master the event structure of RVCs and its interaction with aspect gradually. The headedness of the RVC in relation to event structure depends on its type: V2 is more salient than V1 for the result-state RVC, while V1 is more salient than V2 for the directional RVC.

1 The Journal of Chinese Linguistics (Preprint Article)© 2018 by the Journal of Chinese Linguistics. ISSN 0091-3723/ Memoriam: Sergei Evgenyevich YAKHONTOV (1926-2018). By Alain Peyraube. All rights reserved. MEMORIAM SERGEI EVGENYEVICH YAKHONTOV (1926-2018) Alain Peyraube CRLAO, EHESS, Paris The Russian linguist Sergei E. Yakhontov (Sergej Evgen’evič Jaxontov, Yǎhóngtuōfū 雅 洪 托 夫 in Chinese) passed away on January 28, 2018. He was 91 years old. Jaxontov undoubtedly was one of the best scholars of his generation in Chinese linguistics, and a distinguished researcher in comparative and general linguistics as well. Graduated in 1950 from the Oriental Faculty of Leningrad State University, Sergej E. Jaxontov has been a student of Alexandr Alexandrovič Dragunov (1900-1955, Lóng Guǒfū 龙果夫 in Chinese) and has further advanced many ideas and insights of his professor, creating what is now known as the St. Petersburg (Leningrad) School of Sino-Tibetan linguistics. As early as in 1960, he made decisive contributions to Old Chinese phonology, proposing the medial *-l- as a consonant and a rounded vowel *o (hypothesis that Old Chinese had no freely occurring medial *-w-) predicting the existence of rhyming distinctions not recognized in the traditional analysis, which led him to submit a seven-vowel system with rather restricted distribution. (See the translation of Jaxontov’s (1960) paper in Norman’s (1970) English translation and also Jaxontov (1983, 1986)) The medial *-l- was later treated as *-r- by subsequent researchers: Pulleyblank 1962 who reported having independently arrived at the same idea of a *-l- medial and who thereafter substituted *-r- for his earlier *-l-, and also Baxter (1992, 262) who recognized that Jaxontov’s original proposal was based, among other factors, on the fact that the contrast between division II vowels and other vowels does not appear after Middle Chinese initial l-. 2 JOURNAL OF CHINESE LINGUISTICS (PREPRINT) The Journal of Chinese Linguistics (Preprint Article)© 2018 by the Journal of Chinese Linguistics. ISSN 0091-3723/ Memoriam: Sergei Evgenyevich YAKHONTOV (1926-2018). By Alain Peyraube. All rights reserved. This seven-vowel system was modified by Bodman (1971) to result in a six-vowel system, a model first formally proposed by Bodman’s student Baxter (1980). This six-vowel system is now accepted by many researchers who have reconstructed Tibeto-Burman on the basis of a six-vowel system of Old Chinese, yielding a protolanguage with the same six vowels as Old Chinese (see, among others, Hill 2012, Sagart and Baxter 2017). While S. E. Jaxontov may mostly be remembered as an ingenious phonologist, his research was by no means limited to Old Chinese phonology. Like his mentor A. A. Dragunov who published a masterpiece on Chinese parts of speech in the 1950’s ([1952]1955), he was also a very inspired syntactician and semanticist, being able to compare a wide range of languages with a sound theoretical apparatus capable of isolating the most important syntactical and semantic parameters and to draw significant generalizations from a crosslinguistic perspective. His analyses of the resultative constructions in general linguistics and mainly in Chinese linguistics, dating from 1983 in Russian and later translated into English in 1988 (see Jaxontov 1988a, 1988b), have influenced many young scholars and continue to serve as an indispensable reference work on Chinese resultative constructions. He and his colleague Vladimir Nedjalkov understood resultatives as all verb forms being used to describe a state in the paradigm of dynamic verbs of action and process. More specifically, they defined resultatives as “those verbs that express a state implying a previous event” (Nedjalkov and Jaxontov 1988, 6), i.e. they are “all verb forms and regular deverbal derivatives that may express states, both resultatives and statives” (Nedjalkov and Jaxontov 1988, 7). In Jaxontov (1988b)—exclusively devoted to Chinese resultatives—in the same volume, S. E. Jaxontov developed his monograph of 1957 on the verbal category in Chinese, insisting that Chinese resultatives could be regarded as verb forms with affixes, since they could involve the suffix -zhe 着. All later studies on the status of -zhe in Mandarin are indebted to S. E. Jaxontov (see Smith 1991, Yasuhiro Shirai 1998). As Chen Qianrui (2012, 28) has shown, “the properties of a predicate, in Nedjalkov & Jaxontov’s view...

This study examined the body-part eyes in Mandarin Chinese and German with the majority of the data taken from corpora and dictionaries. Our research goals are to explore: (1) whether Mandarin is a Satellite-framed language as Talmy (2000) and Peyraube (2006) proposed; (2) the characteristics of morphosyntactic structure of the eye expressions; and (3) if certain cognitive modeling of eye expressions can be observed. The main findings are: (a) verbs of eye expressions in Mandarin can be categorized into three thematic types: agent independence, path-patient dependence, and agent-theme causation; (b) German is a satellite-framed language, but Chinese is a verb-framed language; and (c) through cross-linguistic comparison, we verify the typology of concept structuring. Linguistic studies mutually verify one another.