| Traditional Chinese philologists have never indagated Chinese with the knowledge of grammar, which is to say, during the thousands of years of their practice, they have no sense of such grammatical terms as "noun","verb","adjective",or "subject","predicate","object". Alternatively,in order to establish Chinese grammar, they opted to learn from the western grammar theories as well as their research methods, and used them to investigate the rules of Chinese grammatical structures. Unfortunately, there is a sort of practical conundrum they go through and that is: how to effectively incorporate the western theories into the study of Chinese syntactic structures.Although researchers have been taking pains to study the rules of the Chinese syntactic structures, little success has been made. For example, basic question with regard to how to classify word classes has not been worked out even till now, and falls into cyclical debates. The major reason lies in the fact that, in previous studies,researchers have imposed an "Indo-European eye" on Chinese. This sort of research method has given rise to a large number of grammatical artifacts which fit European languages well but do not exist in Chinese at all. Confronted with this dilemma,Chinese grammarians doubted if the grammatical theories established on the basis of western languages were suitable for studying Chinese. As a result, there is a growing consensus that in order to effectively integrate western grammar theories with the study of Chinese, researchers have to figure out what the true nature of Chinese is.This consensus obviously lends itself to the Chinese word-class investigation as well: researchers should turn from looking for the surface variations existing in the foreign languages they are familiar with to investigating the real distinctions accentuated by Chinese speakers. So in a sense, this study not only executes this consensus,but also verifys whether this "turn" works for establishing Chinese grammar.As mono-syllabic Chinese-character words are the primitive structural units in Chinese,and by following the logical principle of "from the simple to the complex"as well, this study takes the Chinese mono-syllabic nouns and verbs made of single characters as its research targets. Additionally, taking the theoretical claim that"words can not be classified on the basis of their meaning"(Zhu 1985: 10) into consideration, this dissertation investigated the following three questions: (1) Can Chinese mono-syllabic nouns be differentiated from the mono-syllabic verbs on the lexical level? In another word, based on their lexical features, can Chinese mono-syllabic nouns be distinguished from the mono-syllabic verbs neuro-biologically? If so, what are the features? (2)Are there any essential neuro-typological distinctions between Chinese word-class processing and that of the inflectional ones, such as English and German? (3)lf so, what are their manifestation on the linguistic level?And how should linguists find the universal word-classes cross-linguistically while penetrating these linguistic differences?In this dissertation, two electrophysiological experiments and one behavioral experiment were carried out. The two electrophysiological experiments investigated the neuro-cognitive mechanisms of Chinese bare mono-syllabic nouns,verbs, and noun-verb multi-category words(Chapter 4 & 5),as well as the neuro-cognitive mechanisms of Chinese bare mono-syllabic nouns and verbs embedded in violating contexts respectively(Chapter 6). Based on the electrophysiological experiment results, questions (1) and (2) were answered. By investigating the Chinese native speakers' natural language intuitions,the psychological reality of word classes'universal conceptual bases and the construction-specific property of word-classes were verified (Chapter 7). As a result, question (3) was answered.According to the experiment results, we come to the following conclusions:(1)Unlike Yang et al.(2002), which didn't report any neuro-separability between Chinese mono-syllabic nouns and verbs presented barely, this dissertation discovered Chinese bare mono-syllabic verbs elicited more negative frontal N100 than the bare mono-syllabic nouns. The more negative frontal N100 elicited by mono-syllabic verbs indicated that these verbs caught more early visual attention. After checking the orthographic features of the characters constituting these mono-syllabic verbs used in our experiments, we found the verbs consist of more distinctive and solid semantic radicals. Hereby, it is the very hints such as the semantic, syntactic function, or spatial configuration cues provided by these radicals let the bare mono-syllabic verbs receive more visual attention. This finding provides evidence for the claim that semantic radicals can be taken as one of the word-class division criteria for Chinese mono-syllabic words. Compared with the bare mono-syllabic nouns and verbs respectively,bare multi-category words shared the same neuro-cognitive mechanism with the nouns, and there was only one difference between the multi-category words and the verbs——verbs elicited a more negative frontal N100 than the multi-category words.This electrophysiological difference also dues to the more consistent radicals granted by the verbs.(2)When embedded in violating contexts, mono-syllabic nouns and verbs evoked identical electro-physiological response pattern——they all elicited a more negative N400 indicating semantic integration processing than the control words. But the response pattern evoked by the corresponding Indo-European conditions is quite another thing, which goes like "ELAN+P600"(Friederici 2002, 2011; Friederici et al.1999; Hahne & Friederici 1999, 2002). Taking the respective functional correlates of these three components into consideration, the difference between these two response patterns indicates that the neuro-cognitive mechanisms of Chinese word-classes do differ from the Indo-European ones. This finding provides evidence for the claim that Chinese differs from Indo-European languages typologically: the former is a language of semantic-syntax; the latter ones are languages of grammatical-syntax.(3)The results of questionnaire confirm that basic semantic categories(object vs.action) provide psychologically-real and crosslinguistically-universal conceptual bases for basic word-classes(nouns vs. verbs), which makes finding universal word-classes cross-linguistically possible. Meanwhile, this finding also verifies the symbolic nature of word-classes,that is, word-classes are not the pure "form-classes"claimed by the American structuralism but "form-meaning" pairs. What's more,the construction-specific properties of word-classes in particular language were demonstrated by the Chinese-speakers' natural language intuitions: based on the prototypicality of word-construction combination, the same word could show different sorts of syntactic function in various constructions in different degree. The construction-specific property further indicates that word classes are of language-specificity as well. The language-specific and construction-specific properties both require that, no matter in theoretical or empirical studies, researchers should provide detailed and theoretically-grounded definitions for the constructions in which the words investigated are embedded. Only by doing this, can the comparability between different researches be guaranteed.Taking all the above experimental findings into consideration, we put forward the following understandings of Chinese word-class:(1)A semantic radical asymmetry can lead to significant neuro-separability between Chinese bare mono-syllabic nouns and verbs, which indicates that just like the Indo-European languages, Chinese also shows clear noun-verb distinction.(2)Unlike Indo-European speakers who rely on morphological information heavily to process word classes, Chinese speakers pay more attention to the semantic differences between nouns and verbs.(3)These neuro-typological differences between inflectional languages and Chinese mentioned in (2) embody themselves in the linguistic aspect as follows:distinguishing from the inflectional languages possessing clear word-classes indicating morphological markers, Chinese mono-syllabic nouns and verbs can differentiate each other on the strength of the semantic radicals constituting themselves. These cross-linguistic form representation differences of word-classes turn out that: the corresponding word-classes between different languages can only be explored on semantic grounds rather than on formal ones,which is determinated by the word-classes' "meaning-form" symbolic nature. |
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