Basis For Individual Linguistic Choices In Modern Chinese

Starting in the early 1960s western scientists began to seriously investigate the patterns governing human behavior. Experts in such seemingly unrelated fields as mathematics, linguistics, psychology, cybernetics, vastly contributed to our understanding of what we are and how we function. In the mid 1960s Transactional Analysis, a new school of social psychology, appeared, and a decade later a brand new branch of science had to be formed: Neuro-Linguistic Programming. It combined linguistics and psychology into one consistent pragmatic theory, which researchers further united into the Personality Process Model.This forty-year-long research has among other things yielded the rudimentary knowledge of why certain people clearly tend to use specific linguistic patterns, be them words, phrases, sentence structures or intonations. According to researchers, such choices largely depend upon an individual's personality adaptation.Since the research conducted on English-speaking subjects proved fruitful, a question arose as to whether similar patterns could also be found in speech by Chinese native speakers. In order to find out whether such a hypothesis was true, nearly 30 Chinese-speaking volunteers were asked to fill the answer sheet of a personality questionnaire, and were interviewed in order to obtain samples of their linguistic patterns.Thus obtained samples were analyzed according to their Chinese equivalents of the criteria found to be relevant in English speakers, which was, in this study, particular certain word choices. The number of occurrences of each criterion was carefully noted and fed into a computer database. Finally, the complete database was cross-analyzed in order to find possible correlations between the pre-selected word choices and the results of the subjects' answers to the personality adaptation questionnaire.The results of this study correspond with the earlier findings in English speakers and it seems that the theories formulated in the earlier studies translate well into the patterns of linguistic choices in Chinese speakers.