Phonological Cues In Chinese Nouns And Verbs

Linguistic studies of word class have generally focused on syntactic and semantic aspects, but have largely ignored the phonological part. Yet the importance of phonological properties in lexical categorization has been recognized in both psycho-and cognitive linguistics literature. In recent years phonological generalizations in word classes have been made via either corpus-based or human participating researches in many Indo-European languages. Phonological features, involving the quality of vowels and consonant, word and syllable length, etc., have been developed into parameters that effectively distinguish nouns from verbs. However, such researches have paid little attention to eastern languages. The present study, based on a production experiment and supporting corpus analysis, attempts to explore whether there are phonological cues in noun and verb word classes in Mandarin Chinese. The present study assessed the phonological forms of the production experiment data for five proved cues found in English so as to see if these parameters also work for Mandarin Chinese or not. The tonal patterns of the production data and supporting corpus data are also analyzed in order to find out possible tonal cues in noun and verb word classes in Mandarin Chinese. The results show that word length in phonemes of nouns are significantly longer than that of verbs, and level tones are more frequently used in disyllabic nouns. Therefore, word length in phonemes and frequency of level tones are very likely to be phonological cues in noun and verb classification in Mandarin Chinese.