| Nominal groups (NGs) are widely used in written Chinese. Yet, if NGs are too long, they tend to be ambiguous in meaning, especially for learners of Chinese as a foreign language. The present study seeks to find out the commonly acceptable length of long NGs in contemporary Chinese, and the structural patterns that usually render these NGs long, as few studies have been made in this regard. Drawing on the UCLA corpus of written Chinese as data, the study focuses on long ren-NGs (i.e. NGs with ren as the Head noun), for ren is found to be the most frequently-occurring noun in the corpus, apart from being generally recognized as a major participant in the Experiential Grammar. Systemic Functional Grammar is adopted as the framework for analyzing long ren-NGs, with a view to identifying not only the length but also structural patterns of commonly acceptable long ren-NGs and their distribution among different genres.It is found in the analysis that the commonly acceptable length of long ren-NGs in contemporary Chinese is between 6 and 17 characters, and these long ren-NGs are most commonly found in fiction and general prose. Altogether 5 structural patterns are identified, each with one obligatory element and several optional elements. These patterns, in an order of descending frequency, are respectively 1) the Qualifierl pattern,2) the Epithet pattern,3) the Qualifier2 pattern,4) the Classifier pattern, and 5) the Numerative pattern. The first two patterns are commonly seen in fiction and general prose, the third in fiction and press, the fourth in general prose and press, and the fifth in press and fiction.Theoretically, the present study offers an adapted coding scheme more suitable for NG structures in the Chinese language. Besides, being corpus-based, the study offers quantitative evidence for some of the existing studies on NG structures. Practically, it offers implications for the teaching and learning of Chinese and English-Chinese translation regarding proper use of NGs. |
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