thesis meaning in mandarin

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Translations for thesis in the English » Chinese Dictionary

Thesis <theses [ˈθiːsiːz] > [ˈθiːsıs] n, usage examples with thesis, monolingual examples (not verified by pons editors).

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Stress, emphasis, pause, and meaning in Mandarin

November 8, 2017 @ 4:24 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Intonation , Phonetics and phonology , Pronunciation , Semantics , Tones

« Annotating the First Page of the First Navajo-English Dictionary | Arabella Kushner, young ambassador of good will »

« previous post | next post »

In " Mandarin Janus sentences " (11/4/17), there arose the question of whether duōshǎo 多少 ("how many") and duō shǎo 多少 ("how few") are spoken differently.  I'm very glad that, in the comments, Chris Button recognizes that Sinitic languages can have stress.  (The same is doubtless true of other tonal languages).

This is an aspect of Mandarin and the other Sinitic languages that most scholars completely ignore and even disavow.  I've written about it from time to time on Language Log, e.g.:

" When intonation overrides tone " (6/4/13) " When intonation overrides tone, part 2 " (5/11/17) " Tones and the brain " (3/3/15) " Dissimilation, stress, sandhi, and other tonal variations in Mandarin (8/26/14) " slip(per) " (7/22/14) " Mandarin by the numbers " (6/8/13) " Where did Chinese tones come from and where are they going? " (6/25/13) " Pinyin memoirs " (8/13/16)

In the next to the last post, I note that University of Oslo student Øystein Krogh Visted has recently (2012) written a very interesting M.A thesis entitled "Nuances of Pronunciation in Chinese:  Lexical Stress in Beijing Mandarin."  Here's a brief description of the thesis:

The pronunciation of Beijing Mandarin, which is the basis for Modern Standard Mandarin, is in reality not as straightforward as it is usually presented. General books on the language and common textbooks in English on the subject usually only give very basic, prescriptive (though supposedly descriptive) analyses of the basic features of pronunciation. Finer points are generally not discussed in any detail. The treatment of amongst other things the aspect of word stress (the parts of words that are emphasized in speech) in mastering and indeed properly understanding Chinese is thus neglected. It has not yet acquired the position in Chinese language-teaching it arguably needs, so that the language may begin to be taught and indeed learned in a more comprehensive manner. This book will take a basic analytical approach to the phenomenon of word stress in Beijing Mandarin. It compares and discusses available meta-information on the topic, as well as its theoretical underpinnings and practical applications, and from a pedagogical starting point aims to bring attention to these important nuances in the Chinese language.

See especially this comment to the last post:

Reading pinyin text for me is as easy as reading English, and I can skim-read it the way I do English. I prefer the texts not to have tone marks, because I have to make an effort to block them out, just as I would have to make an effort to block out accent and stress marks if they were included in normal English text. In this sense, what Wang Yujiang mentioned in several of his comments is true (see especially his excellent response to Cory Lubliner): when Chinese speak or read out a text, they do not enunciate the tones one by one as they are marked in a dictionary. Rather, they develop a rhythm in their reading / speech / singing (for that matter) in which emphasis, stress, and overall "feel" of a sentence / utterance become dominant, rather than the canonical dictionary entry tonal categories of individual characters. This is a phenomenon that a few Czech phoneticians have observed, and Christoph Harbsmeier (the German-Norwegian-Danish Sinologist) has paid particular attention to. The problem is that it's virtually impossible to predict how this will turn out ahead of time for discrete characters. The flow of a sentence or utterance only happens in real time and under the emotions of the moment. Of course, if one is anal about it, one could devise means for notating such spoken sentences once they were uttered, but I don't know how useful that information would be for pedagogical purposes, and to what purpose one would put it other than for phonological research.

Without mentioning names, I know non-native speakers who have astonishingly good mastery of tones for thousands of characters, some of them who even wag their fingers or bob their heads in the air when they pronounce the tones as they are speaking or reading Chinese (it's very painful to watch). The best speakers of Chinese that I know (and here again I'm not mentioning names, though it would be very easy to list a dozen or so of the best), almost uniformly, are not tied to the individual characters / syllables, but rather have developed the ability to grasp the overall sound pattern of whole sentences. It is very impressive (and satisfying) to listen to them do this, and some of them develop this ability very quickly, already within the first year of their study of Mandarin or Cantonese or Taiwanese, or whichever Sinitic language they are studying. In no case are such masters of spoken Chinese languages fixated on the characters.

Nor, I would add, are they fixated on the tones.  Real speakers of Mandarin (and other Sinitic languages) are not robots.  They do not utter sentences and paragraphs as though they were matching the canonical, citation tones listed for characters in dictionaries mechanically one after another to the syllables of their speech.  Rather, human speech has a rhythm and a flow through which it imparts meaning and emotion.

Phoneticians, psycholinguists, and other specialists have studied the phenomenon of pitch at the lexical level and at the sentence level, but the results of their research are not well known (or known at all) to Sinologists and Chinese language teachers.

A couple of citations:

"Jie Liang and Vincent J. van Heuven, "Chinese tone and intonation perceived by L1 and L2 listeners", in Tomas Riad and Carlos Gussenhoven, ed., Tones and Tunes: Experimental studies in word and sentence prosody , pp. 27-62.

Shu-hui Peng, Marjorie K. M. Chan, Chiu-yu Tseng, Tsan Huang, Ok Joo Lee, and Mary E. Beckman, "Towards a Pan-Mandarin System for Prosodic Transcription", in Sun-Ah Jun, ed., Prosodic Typology:  The Phonology of Intonation and Phrasing, Vol. 1 , pp. 230-270.

In the preceding two paragraph quotation, I mentioned Czech scholars who have paid attention to these aspects of Mandarin speech.  Chief among them is the phonologist Oldřich Švarný who recorded huge quantities of the beautiful Pekingese speech of Tang Yunling and analyzed it in terms of stress patterns.  Christoph Harbsmeier, whom I also mentioned above, has arranged for the digitization of this enormous corpus, which makes these invaluable recordings available for further and more sophisticated studies (now that more advanced hardware and software have been developed).

Even more wonderful, Harbsmeier has loaded all of the digitized spoken material from Švarný-Tang into a beta web-site called MILK (Mandarin Audio Idiolect Dictionary).  This makes the material easily accessible to all who are interested in pursuing research on conversationally spoken, not read, Mandarin.  For each line of the transcript, you can open a window that displays the following:  waveform & spectrogram, formants, pitch, and selection stats.  Harbsmeier has informed me that he and his team have also applied Praat-style analysis to the recordings so that we can see where the stress is.  Through all of these devices, the phonetic features of Tang laoshi's speech are made visible.

Now, I invite you to the treat of listening to the 2,200 occurrences of 多少 in the Švarný-Tang corpus as it is recorded in Harbsmeier's MILK .  I think you will be astonished at the wide variation for just this one lexeme as it is realized in the living speech of a reliable native informant.  Enjoy!

21 Comments

Noel hunt said,.

November 8, 2017 @ 6:45 pm

Thanks for the references to works on stress. This is an important area if one wants to speak 'flawless' Chinese, but it's not all. I would also like to see work done on 'articulatory setting' in Chinese. I think a fair amount of work on English and French has been done on this topic, and to some extent Japanese (Timothy Vance) but I have never seen discussions of articulatory setting in Chinese.

Michael Watts said,

November 8, 2017 @ 7:17 pm

I had a native Mandarin speaker tell me that Beijing 北京 is stressed on the first syllable. Unfortunately, I'm not able to hear that — for me, tones 1 and 4 are strong, and tones 2 and 3 are weak, and my mental phonology does not allow for lexical stress to fall on a weak syllable. The tone sequence of 北京 is 3-1, and I inevitably perceive stress on the 京. :-(

Mark Liberman said,

November 9, 2017 @ 7:57 am

For those interested in Mandarin stress, I recommend the works of San Duanmu , perhaps starting with his chapter on " Syllable Structure and Stress " from the Handbook of Chinese Linguistics , and including his book The Phonology of Standard Chinese .

Relevant work that I've been involved with includes " A cross-linguistic study of prosodic focus ", IEEE ICASSP 2015, " Investigating Consonant Reduction in Mandarin Chinese with Improved Forced Alignment ", InterSpeech 2015, and " Prosodic Strength Intrinsic to Lexical Items: A Corpus Study of Tone Reduction in Tone4+Tone4 Words in Mandarin Chinese ", ICSLP 2016.

Victor Mair said,

November 9, 2017 @ 12:21 pm

One of Švarný's students, Hana Třísková, has followed in his steps. She writes: "Yes, I continue working on stress (in fact, on NON-STRESS / reduction, which, in my view, is more interesting and phonologically important in Chinese than stress)".

Here are a couple of recent papers by her:

Třísková, Hana. De-stressed words in Mandarin: drawing parallel with English. In: Hongyin Tao ed. Integrating Chinese Linguistics Research and Language Teaching and Learning. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2016. pp. 121–144.

Třísková, Hana. De-stress in Mandarin: clitics, cliticoids and phonetic chunks. In: Istvan Kecskes and Chaofen Sun eds. Key Issues in Chinese as a Second Language Research. New York and London: Routledge, 2017. pp. 29–56.

ISBN: 978-1-138-96053-4

Třísková, Hana. Acquiring and teaching Chinese pronunciation. In: Istvan Kecskes ed., Explorations into Chinese as a Second Language. Cham: Springer, Educational Linguistics series, 2017. pp. 3–30. (broader topic – how to teach Mandarin pronunciation as such)

If someone is really interested in any of these papers, I have pdfs. Additional papers by Hana are available here: https://cas-cz.academia.edu/HanaTriskova/Articles-in-English

Chris Button said,

November 9, 2017 @ 1:46 pm

@ Noel Hunt

I think "Articulatory Setting" has not garnered much attention from linguists because it is too rigid and all-encompassing. While I do feel it can on the whole be better accounted for by more traditional explanations, it does nonetheless highlight a very important aspect of pronunciation – namely that phonemes are essentially abstract and accordingly counter-intuitive to how we generally process speech in syllabic chunks (the syllable being essentially schwa whether underlyingly inherent or overtly manifested).

For example, a /t/ phoneme is only really identifiable through the formants in its surrounding vocalic environment which will vary depending on whether the /t/ is alveolar, lamino-dental, retroflex etc. This is why the /i:/ in "tea" said by a typical speaker of Indian English after an unaspirated retroflex will sound different from the RP or GenAm /i:/ after an aspirated alveolar. As such, it is not simply the consonant that is different, but also the effect it has on the vowel. This can also go the other way – for example the "dark-l" when used in initial position by North Americans may be lighter (i.e. more like a British pronunciation) before certain vowels. In short, although the distinction between consonants and vowels can be refuted on an underlying phonological level (as has been argued for some living languages, and always eventually ends up being the case for reconstructed ones such as Old Chinese and Proto-Indo-European when presented without agenda), a distinction still needs to be maintained on the surface phonetic level, but even there they are crucially still mutually dependent on one another in speech.

Since we like to make speech as easy as possible on our articulators, we predict coming sounds and do not stray any further than is required in order to make the next one – the cumulative effect of this behavior leads to what I think is being termed as "articulatory setting". However, rather than being a "setting", it is simply a reflection of our articulators becoming used to certain articulatory postions and then maximising the efficiency in how we manipulate them in sequences. This is why the initial stages of learning a foreign language with very different sounds from one's own can be physically quite tiring but over time people's mouths adjust as appropriate. If someone wants to mimic a specific accent, I would say the most important aspect is to nail the articulation perfectly and the supposed "articulatory setting" will just be a natural consequence of it.

November 9, 2017 @ 2:23 pm

I should probably add that it is this mutual dependence/influence which is behind diachronic sound change. To continue with the "ti" example above, that is why the "t" has palatalised to /tʃ/ or /ʃ/ in "question" or "nation" before what was originally a high front vowel that, along with "o", is now simply schwa in an unstressed syllable. In terms of synchronic analysis, we then need to arbitrarily decide whether /tʃ/ and /ʃ/ are simply allophones of /t/ or alternatively independent phonemes regardless of their historical origin.

Jerry Friedman said,

November 9, 2017 @ 2:33 pm

Michael Watts: When I took a class in Chinese literature in translation from Prof. Y. K. Kao, I got the impression that all Chinese bisyllables were accented on the first syllable. But I couldn't have told you the tone of any syllable I heard him say.

(At the beginning of the semester, he gave us a handout by Prof. Lynn White with some guidance on pronouncing Wade-Giles and Pinyin, but he said we weren't going to worry about pronunciation. I did notice a slight change in his facial expression when a student read "Liu I" as "Leeoo One."

Have a right paren: )

~flow said,

November 9, 2017 @ 3:23 pm

FWIW there's a 2016 paper by Zuzana Pospěchová available at https://revije.ff.uni-lj.si/ala/article/view/4592/6342 on the Prosodic Transcription of Standard Chinese (PTR) that makes use of the system devided by Oldřich Švarný.

A short sample:

PY: Zuótian Zhāng lǎoshī qǐng wǒmen qù tā jiā chīfàn. PTR: Zuótiān, zhāng-lao³shī, qǐng-women-qu⁴ ta¹-jiā chī-fàn.

昨天张老师请我们去他家吃饭。

Tones are indicated by both diacritics and superscript numbers; the diacritics are for full tones, and the numbers are for weakened tones ("weakened tone ictus-bearing syllables", the paper says). Thus, 'lao³shī' would appear to indicate that both syllables do bear tones, but the second syllable is more prominent. I found this interesting because that closely matches the way I learned the way, whereas David Marjanović reported that "my textbook had "teacher" as lǎoshi, acknowledging the fact that the second syllable is toneless"; maybe there's more than one correct way to pronounce this word.

Bathrobe said,

November 9, 2017 @ 6:58 pm

I think lǎoshi is more appropriate for 老是 than for 老师.

Eidolon said,

November 9, 2017 @ 7:21 pm

How does one "teach" lexical stress? I must confess this concept is alien to me, as I have never encountered, either in foreign language learning or native language learning, pedagogical approaches to imparting an instinct of lexical stress.

Jonathan Smith said,

November 9, 2017 @ 7:50 pm

Thanks to MYL for the links above. A point relevant to some of the above discussion is at p. 14 of Duanmu's chapter: "intuitive agreement on the stress difference between two heavy syllables, such as [jou dəŋ] ‘oil lamp’ in Beijing, is hard to obtain." I.e., speakers simply do not agree which if either syllable of lao3shi1, etc., is stressed, or (more often) simply find the question mystifying. It's not clear which phonetic device(s) might be leveraged to mark emphasis in such cases. I see little benefit in a Švarný-style "phonetic" transcription.

Obviously, intonation is an important thing, and "neutral tone" is an important thing not least as it is a kind of stress loss — driver of "tone sandhi" processes across Sinitic and typologically similar languages. But my naive view is that it would be hard to disprove that Mandarin disyllabic words all have underlying initial stress and that a complex package of factors [compare those noted in the "Corpus Study of Tone Reduction…" abstract above] determines whether or not the second syllable surfaces with neutralized tone + attendant segmental reductions. This seems basically consistent with Duanmu's argument… I think.

November 9, 2017 @ 10:32 pm

Thus, 'lao³shī' would appear to indicate that both syllables do bear tones, but the second syllable is more prominent. I found this interesting because that closely matches the way I learned the way, whereas David Marjanović reported that "my textbook had "teacher" as lǎoshi, acknowledging the fact that the second syllable is toneless"; maybe there's more than one correct way to pronounce this word.

This is probably due to the standard lexical stress for the word in isolation varying in certain contexts.

To give an example from English following the John Wells approach, a word like 'funda'mental has two stressed syllables "fund" and "ment" to attract accents. In isolation, the nuclear tone falls on "ment" as the last stressed syllable to give 'funda\mental (dictionaries usually refer to this as secondary and primary stress since they don't mark intonation tones). However, when combined with 'problem (or rather \problem in isolation), a native speaker tends to de-accent the middle stressed syllable "ment" (in what John Wells calls "The Rule of 3") to leave the phrase 'fundamental 'problem (or rather 'fundamental \problem with the nuclear tone marked). Only the most proficient non-native speakers are ever going to produce something like that.

November 10, 2017 @ 6:38 am

@ Jonathan Smith

My understanding, if I understand Kratochvil's work correctly, is that there is a tendency towards iambic (unstressed – stressed) alternations across an intonation phrase, but that this is frequently overridden by trochaic (stressed – unstressed) compounds. I should now compare that to what Profs Mair and Liberman have kindly referenced here.

November 10, 2017 @ 6:58 am

To continue with the "ti" example above, that is why the "t" has palatalised to /tʃ/ or /ʃ/ in "question" or "nation" before what was originally a high front vowel t…

Ok so my example here isn't a great one in English because the palatalisation had already happened before the borrowing and we just borrowed the spelling convention! In any case, the general point is the same…

Rodger C said,

November 10, 2017 @ 9:41 am

when a student read "Liu I" as "Leeoo One"

Any relation to Malcolm the Tenth?

November 10, 2017 @ 2:00 pm

@Chris Button: The palatalization of /t/ to /s/ in "nation" had already happened when English got the word (hence Middle-English spellings like "nacyon"), but the further palatalization of /s/ to /ʃ/ had not. Words with "stion" like "question" did not have phonological palatalization when they entered English; the preceeding /s/ had a protective effect on the following /t/. In modern French, these words have /sj/ and /tj/ respectively.

November 10, 2017 @ 2:26 pm

Good point – thanks for clarifying! That explains the different /tʃ/ or /ʃ/ reflexes in English (I actually speak pretty decent French so should really have caught that one myself)

Following on from that, do you have any idea why "bastion" and by extension the name "Sebastian" resist palatalisation in British English (they tend to palatalise regularly in North American English)? Could it simply be down to low frequency use of the word "bastion" which in turn influences the pronunciation of the name?

November 10, 2017 @ 4:45 pm

Now that I have this mulling around in my head, I bet it was the other way round with the name "Sebastian" being the exception (due to it being a name and perhaps having a convoluted route into English) and then influencing the noun "bastion" due to the homophony.

Jefferson DeMarco said,

November 12, 2017 @ 7:56 pm

I have just begun an informal study of MSM on my own using an app called Memrise. One of the strengths of this app is that it has videos of a wide variety of native speakers saying the phrases we have been learning. I was amazed at how different the exact same words sounded from speaker to speaker. It doesn't take you very far, but seems pretty good for an introduction.

November 12, 2017 @ 8:45 pm

@Jefferson DeMarco

Thanks! Sounds interesting. What you write complements another post I'll be making about these issues on Tuesday or Wednesday.

Can you give us a link to a website describing this app?

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How cues from structure and meaning impact Mandarin sentence processing – an electrophysiological study of argument structure and adjective placement

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• Wolpert, Max
• Shari Baum (Supervisor2)
• Karsten Steinhauer (Supervisor1)
• Mandarin has a combination of features that are relatively unusual across human languages. In this thesis, we took advantage of these features to study sentence processing in native and non-native speakers. To study processing in real time, we used electroencephalography (EEG) data to analyze event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Our behavioral and ERP results together provide new insight into processing of diverse sentence types, as presented in two manuscripts.In Manuscript I, we considered Mandarin verb-final transitive sentences, which allow both patient-first and agent-first word orders. We asked participants to read sentences and identify the agent, while recording their responses, reaction times, and EEG. Our analysis showed that coverbs are the strongest cue for comprehension and that word order did not impact interpretation in the absence of other cues. We also found that role reversal sentences, where an implausible noun is expressed as the agent of a verb, elicited N400 effects, in line with sentence processing models that predict crosslinguistic differences in core parsing mechanisms.In Manuscript II, we studied word order in native and non-native processing of adjective phrases. Mandarin adjectives typically precede the nouns they modify but may also occur directly following a noun. Native speakers showed an N400-P600 response for both English and Mandarin adjective placement violations. In contrast to English, Mandarin results showed an additional N400 effect that may be related to the lexical status of adjectives. Non-native ERP results showed an N400 effect with no P600, in line with predictions for intermediate-proficiency second language learners. We further explored individual differences in ERP patterns, showing that participants exhibited a full range of responses that was not reflected in the grand average.These two manuscripts contribute to our understanding of the diversity of Mandarin sentence structures and their processing. Manuscript I is the first use of an ERP paradigm with a forced-choice agent assignment task and reveals an intricate interplay among competing cues for argument structure processing. Manuscript II replicates prior findings from English, but also presents new data that inform our understanding of Mandarin adjective phrase structure and the extent of individual variability in ERP patterns
• Le mandarin présente une combinaison de caractéristiques relativement peu communes parmi les langues humaines. Dans cette thèse, nous avons exploité ces propriétés pour étudier le traitement de phrases chez les locuteurs natifs et non-natifs du mandarin. Afin d’évaluer le traitement en temps réel, nous avons analysé les potentiels évoqués (ERPs) issus des enregistrements électroencéphalographiques (EEG). Nos résultats comportementaux et des ERPs permettent d’obtenir une nouvelle compréhension du traitement de différents types de phrases, tel que présenté dans deux manuscrits.Dans le Manuscrit I, nous avons considéré des phrases transitives en mandarin ayant leur verbe en position finale, et dont le premier nom pouvait avoir soit le rôle argumental d’Agent, soit celui de Patient. Nous avons demandé aux participants de lire ces phrases et d'identifier l’Agent, alors que nous enregistrions leurs réponses, temps de réaction et EEG. Nos analyses montrent que les coverbes sont l’indice le plus important pour la compréhension de phrases en mandarin, et que l’ordre des mots n’influence pas l’interprétation en l’absence d’autres indices.Dans le Manuscrit II, nous avons étudié l’effet de l’ordre des mots sur le traitement natif et non-natif de constructions adjectivales. En mandarin, les adjectifs précèdent habituellement les noms qu’ils modifient, mais peuvent également parfois les suivre immédiatement. Les placements agrammaticaux d’adjectifs ont élicité une réponse N400-P600 chez les locuteurs natifs, tant en anglais qu’en mandarin. À la différence de l’anglais, les résultats en mandarin ont montré un effet N400 additionnel qui peut être associé au statut lexical des adjectifs. Les ERPs des locuteurs non-natifs présentaient un effet N400 sans P600. Ces résultats correspondent aux prédictions pour des apprenants d’une langue seconde de niveau intermédiaire. Nous avons aussi exploré les différences individuelles dans les résultats ERPs, montrant que les participants présentaient une gamme complète de réponses qui n'était pas reflétée dans la moyenne générale des ERPs.Ces deux manuscrits permettent de mieux comprendre la diversité des structures de phrases en mandarin ainsi que leur traitement. Le Manuscript I rapporte la première utilisation d’un paradigme ERP avec une tâche d’identification obligatoire du nom ayant le rôle d’Agent. Il révèle une interaction complexe entre des indices concurrents dans le traitement de la structure argumentale de la phrase. Le Manuscrit II reproduit des résultats antérieurs obtenus en anglais mais présente également de nouvelles données qui éclairent notre compréhension de la structure des constructions adjectivales en mandarin, ainsi que de l’étendue de la variabilité inter-individuelle dans les données ERP
• Neuroscience
• McGill University
•  https://escholarship.mcgill.ca/concern/theses/xg94hv95p
• All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated.
• Integrated Program in Neuroscience
• Doctor of Philosophy

• 1.1 Etymology
• 1.2 Pronunciation
• 1.3.1 Derived terms
• 1.3.2 Related terms
• 1.3.3 Translations
• 1.4 References
• 1.5 Further reading
• 1.6 Anagrams
• 2.1 Etymology
• 2.2 Pronunciation
• 3.1 Etymology
• 3.2 Pronunciation
• 3.3.1 Declension
• 3.3.2 Descendants
• 3.4 References

From Late Middle English thesis ( “ lowering of the voice ” ) [ 1 ] and also borrowed directly from its etymon Latin thesis ( “ proposition, thesis; lowering of the voice ” ) , from Ancient Greek θέσῐς ( thésis , “ arrangement, placement, setting; conclusion, position, thesis; lowering of the voice ” ) , from τῐ́θημῐ ( títhēmi , “ to place, put, set; to put down in writing; to consider as, regard ” ) [ 2 ] [ 3 ] (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *dʰeh₁- ( “ to do; to place, put ” ) ) + -σῐς ( -sis , suffix forming abstract nouns or nouns of action, process, or result ) . The English word is a doublet of deed .

Sense 1.1 (“proposition or statement supported by arguments”) is adopted from antithesis . [ 2 ] Sense 1.4 (“initial stage of reasoning”) was first used by the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), and later applied to the dialectical method of his countryman, the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831).

The plural form theses is borrowed from Latin thesēs , from Ancient Greek θέσεις ( théseis ) .

Pronunciation

• ( Received Pronunciation ) IPA ( key ) : /ˈθiːsɪs/ , ( archaic ) /ˈθɛsɪs/

• ( General American ) IPA ( key ) : /ˈθisɪs/
• Rhymes: -iːsɪs
• Hyphenation: the‧sis
• ( Received Pronunciation ) IPA ( key ) : /ˈθiːsiːz/
• ( General American ) IPA ( key ) : /ˈθisiz/
• Rhymes: -iːsiːz
• Hyphenation: the‧ses

thesis ( plural theses )

• ( rhetoric ) A proposition or statement supported by arguments .
• 1766 , [ Oliver Goldsmith ], “The Conclusion”, in The Vicar of Wakefield:   [ … ] , volume II, Salisbury, Wiltshire: [ … ] B. Collins, for F [ rancis ] Newbery ,   [ … ] , →OCLC , pages 218–219 : I told them of the grave, becoming, and ſublime deportment they ſhould aſſume upon this myſtical occaſion, and read them two homilies and a theſis of my own compoſing, in order to prepare them.
• ( mathematics , computer science ) A conjecture , especially one too vague to be formally stated or verified but useful as a working convention.
• ( logic ) An affirmation , or distinction from a supposition or hypothesis .
• ( philosophy ) In the dialectical method of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel : the initial stage of reasoning where a formal statement of a point is developed ; this is followed by antithesis and synthesis .
• ( music , prosody , originally ) The action of lowering the hand or bringing down the foot when indicating a rhythm ; hence, an accented part of a measure of music or verse indicated by this action; an ictus , a stress . Antonym: arsis
• ( music , prosody , with a reversal of meaning ) A depression of the voice when pronouncing a syllables of a word ; hence, the unstressed part of the metrical foot of a verse upon which such a depression falls , or an unaccented musical note .

Derived terms

• all but thesis
• bachelor's thesis
• Church-Turing thesis
• conflict thesis
• doctoral thesis
• graduate thesis
• Habakkuk thesis
• master's thesis
• Merton thesis
• private language thesis
• thesis defense
• thesis statement

Related terms

Translations.

• ^ “ thē̆sis, n. ”, in MED Online , Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan , 2007 .
• ^ “ thesis, n. ”, in Lexico , Dictionary.com ; Oxford University Press , 2019–2022 .

Further reading

• “ thesis ”, in The Century Dictionary   [ … ] , New York, N.Y.: The Century Co. , 1911 , →OCLC .
• “ thesis ”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary , Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam , 1913 , →OCLC .
• Heists , Sethis , heists , shiest , shites , sithes , thises

From Latin thesis , from Ancient Greek θέσις ( thésis , “ a proposition, a statement, a thing laid down, thesis in rhetoric, thesis in prosody ” ) .

thesis   f ( plural theses or thesissen , diminutive thesisje   n )

• Dated form of these . Synonyms: dissertatie , proefschrift , scriptie

From Ancient Greek θέσις ( thésis , “ a proposition, a statement, a thing laid down, thesis in rhetoric, thesis in prosody ” ) .

• ( Classical Latin ) IPA ( key ) : /ˈtʰe.sis/ , [ˈt̪ʰɛs̠ɪs̠]
• ( modern Italianate Ecclesiastical ) IPA ( key ) : /ˈte.sis/ , [ˈt̪ɛːs̬is]

thesis   f ( genitive thesis ) ; third declension

Descendants

• → Dutch: thesis
• → Armenian: թեզ ( tʻez )
• → Dutch: these
• → Persian: تز ( tez )
• → Romanian: teză
• → Turkish: tez
• Galician: tese
• Italian: tesi
• English: thesis
• Portuguese: tese
• Spanish: tesis
• “ thesis ”, in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short ( 1879 ) A Latin Dictionary , Oxford: Clarendon Press
• thesis in Gaffiot, Félix ( 1934 ) Dictionnaire illustré latin-français , Hachette.

• English terms derived from Proto-Indo-European
• English terms derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *dʰeh₁-
• English terms inherited from Middle English
• English terms derived from Middle English
• English terms borrowed from Latin
• English terms derived from Latin
• English terms derived from Ancient Greek
• English doublets
• English 2-syllable words
• English terms with IPA pronunciation
• English terms with audio links
• Rhymes:English/iːsɪs
• Rhymes:English/iːsɪs/2 syllables
• Rhymes:English/iːsiːz
• Rhymes:English/iːsiːz/2 syllables
• English lemmas
• English nouns
• English countable nouns
• English nouns with irregular plurals
• en:Rhetoric
• English terms with quotations
• en:Mathematics
• en:Computer science
• en:Philosophy
• English contranyms
• Dutch terms derived from Latin
• Dutch terms derived from Ancient Greek
• Dutch terms with audio links
• Dutch lemmas
• Dutch nouns
• Dutch nouns with Latin plurals
• Dutch nouns with plural in -en
• Dutch feminine nouns
• Dutch dated forms
• Latin terms derived from Proto-Indo-European
• Latin terms derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *dʰeh₁-
• Latin terms borrowed from Ancient Greek
• Latin terms derived from Ancient Greek
• Latin 2-syllable words
• Latin terms with IPA pronunciation
• Latin lemmas
• Latin nouns
• Latin third declension nouns
• Latin feminine nouns in the third declension
• Latin feminine nouns
• Word of the day archive
• English entries with language name categories using raw markup
• Pages with 3 entries
• Terms with Armenian translations
• Terms with Asturian translations
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Chinese Linguistics Theses & Dissertations @ OSU (1965 –  )

M.A. Theses & Ph.D. Dissertations in the Graduate Program in Chinese Linguistics, Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures (DEALL) (1971 –  )

Note: Many of the Ph.D. dissertations listed on this webpage are available online as full-text PDF files from OSU Libraries . M.A. theses became available in the OSU Libraries as full-text PDF files beginning in 2009. Ohio State patrons also have free access to full-text PDF files of doctoral dissertations that date from at least the 1980s onwards at ProQuest Dissertations & Theses . Note: Included on this page is information on current faculty members in Chinese linguistics in DEALL (viz., Professors Marjorie K.M. Chan and Zhiguo Xie ) and other DEALL faculty members serving as committee members in Chinese linguistics thesis and dissertation committees. For a list of my advisees only — and those on whose thesis/dissertation committee that I have served on — past and present, see: Students . (Various group photos are also placed there.)

• Bourgerie, Dana Scott. 1987 M.A. thesis. Particles of uncertainty: A discourse approach to the Cantonese final particle.   (Advisor: Timothy Light)
• Bourgerie, Dana Scott. 1990 Ph.D. diss. A quantitative study of sociolinguistic variation in Cantonese. (Advisor: James H.-Y. Tai) (Marjorie K.M. Chan, Committee Member)
• Butler, Craig. 1990 M.A. thesis. An examination of ‘ dao Place ( qu )’ and ‘ qu Place’ in Mandarin Chinese. (Advisor in Au 89-Wi 90: Marjorie K.M. Chan; Advisor for oral defence in Sp 90: Robert Sanders)

• Chao, Fang-yi. 1998 Ph. D. diss. The sound system of the Qieyun : A phonemic interpretation. (Advisor: Frank Feng-sheng Hsueh)
• Chen, Litong. 2012 M.A. thesis. Shaoguan Tuhua, a local vernacular of northern Guangdong Province, China: A new look from a quantitative and contact linguistic perspective. (Advisor: Marjorie K.M. Chan) (Zhiguo Xie, Committee Member)

• Chiang, Mien-Hwa. 1984 M.A. thesis. Three common reduplicated coordinate conjunctions in Chinese. (Advisor: Timothy Light)
• Chiang, Mien-Hwa. 1992 Ph.D. diss. A study of anaphora in Chinese recipe discourse. (Advisor: James H.-Y. Tai)
• Chou, Shizhen. 1989 Ph.D. diss. Hong Wu Zheng Yun: Its relation to the Nanjing dialect and its impact on Standard Mandarin. (Advisor: Frank Feng-sheng Hsueh)

• Christensen, Matthew. 1994 Ph.D. diss. Variation in spoken and written narrative discourse. (Advisor: James H.-Y. Tai) (Marjorie K.M. Chan, Committee Member)
• Cockrum, Paul. 2022 M.A. thesis. Taiwanese Southern Min: Identity and written sociolinguistic variation. (Advisor: Marjorie K.M. Chan)
• Davis, Junko. 2004 M.A. thesis. A Prosodic study of the ‘inverted sentence’ in Beijing Mandarin.   (Advisor: Marjorie K.M. Chan)

• Fang, Ning-ning. 1971 M.A. thesis. A study of the 1956 scheme for simplifying Chinese characters. (Advisor: Eugene Ching)
• Fung, Roxana Suk Yee. 2000 Ph.D. diss. Final particles in Standard Cantonese: Semantic extension and pragmatic inference.   (Advisor: Marjorie K.M. Chan) (Timothy Light, External Committee Member)
• Gilliland, Joshua. 2006 M.A. thesis. Language attitudes and ideologies in Shanghai, China.   (Advisor: Marjorie K.M. Chan)

• He, Baozhang. 1985 M.A. thesis. The two constructions NP + VP and VP + de + NP in Chinese. (Advisor: Timothy Light)
• He, Baozhang. 1992 Ph.D. diss. Situation types and aspectual classes of verbs in Mandarin Chinese. (Advisor: James H.-Y. Tai) (Marjorie K.M. Chan, Committee Member)

• Hu, Wenze. 1989 M.A. thesis. The inverted sentence in the Beijing dialect. (Advisor: James H-Y. Tai)
• Hu, Wenze. 1995 Ph.D. diss. Functional perspectives and Chinese word order. (Advisor: James H.-Y. Tai) (Marjorie K.M. Chan, Committee Member)
• Jagacinski, Ngampit. 1987 Ph.D. diss. Tai Lue of Xishuanebanna in China’s Yunnan Province: Description and a study of the OV order in the Pau construction. (Advisor: Frank Feng-sheng Hsueh)

• Kang, Hana. 2004 M.A. thesis. Heritage language maintenance, acculturation, and identity: Chinese and Korean 1.5 generation immigrants in New Jersey.   (Advisor: Marjorie K.M. Chan)
• Kang, Hana. 2010 Ph.D. diss. Computer-based writing and paper-based writing: A study of beginning-level and intermediate-level Chinese learners’ writing. (Advisor: Marjorie K.M. Chan; Co-Advisor: Alan Hirvela, Education)

• King, Brian. 1989 Ph.D. diss. The conceptual structure of emotional experience in Chinese. (Advisor: James H-Y. Tai)
• Lee, Ok Joo. 2000 M.A. thesis. The pragmatics and intonation of ma -particle questions in Mandarin. (Advisor: Marjorie K.M. Chan)
• Lee, Ok Joo. 2005 Ph.D. diss. The prosody of questions in Beijing Mandarin.   (Advisor: Marjorie K.M. Chan)

• Lin, Huey Hannah. 2005 Ph.D. diss. Contextualizing linguistic politeness in Chinese — A socio-pragmatic approach with examples from persuasive sales talks in Taiwan Mandarin.   (Advisor: Marjorie K.M. Chan)
• Liu, Cheng-hui. 1988 M.A. thesis. Analytical study of the Lingbao dialect. (Advisor: Frank Feng-sheng Hsueh) (Marjorie K.M. Chan, Committee Member)

• McGinnis, Scott. 1990 Ph.D. diss. A pragmatic analysis of Mandarin interrogatives: Data from modern Taiwan drama. (Advisor: James H.-Y. Tai) (Marjorie K.M. Chan, Committee Member)
• Miracle, William Charles. 1987 M.A. thesis. Chinese/English code switching: A preliminary inquiry. (Advisor: Timothy Light)
• Miracle, William Charles. 1991 Ph.D. diss. Discourse markers in Mandarin Chinese. (Advisor: James H-Y. Tai)

• Pan, Junquan. 2018 M.A. thesis. Constructing a gay persona: A sociophonetic case study of an LGBT talk show in Taiwan. (Advisor: Marjorie K.M. Chan) (Zhiguo Xie, Committee Member)
• Ratté, Alexander Takenobu. 2011 M.A. thesis. Contact-induced phonological change in Taiwanese. (Advisor: Marjorie K.M. Chan)
• Riha, Helena. 2006 M.A. thesis. The morphology and semantics of Roman letter words in Mandarin Chinese.   (Advisor: Marjorie K.M. Chan)

• Sergent, Wallace K., Jr. 1990 Ph.D. diss. A study of the oral reading strategies of advanced and highly advanced second language readers of Chinese. (Advisor: James H.-Y. Tai) (Marjorie K.M. Chan, Committee Member)
• Seung, Shauna. 1998 M.A. thesis. Towards accuracy in Chinese tonal production: Seven case studies.   (Advisor: Marjorie K.M. Chan)

• Shen, Jingdi. 2018 M.A. thesis. Regional lexical variation in Modern Written Chinese: Analysis and characterization using geo-tagged social media. (Advisor: Marjorie K.M. Chan)
• Shi, Jianguo. 1994 Ph.D. diss. Shuyang phonology. (Advisor: Frank Feng-sheng Hsueh) (Marjorie K.M. Chan, Committee Member)

• Tang, Jian. 1996 Ph.D. diss. Prototypes in Lesser Seal scripts (China, ca. 221 BC – AD 220).   (Advisor: Marjorie K.M. Chan)
• Wang, Lianqing. 1994 Ph.D. diss. Origin and development of classifiers in Chinese. (Advisor: James H.-Y. Tai) (Marjorie K.M. Chan, Committee Member)
• Wang, Qian. 2015. M.A. thesis. Focus placement and interpretations of bare gradable adjectives in Mandarin Chinese. (Advisor: Zhiguo Xie) (Marjorie K.M. Chan, Committee Member)

• Wu, Sue-mei. 1994 M.A. thesis. Instrumentality in Classical Chinese: A study of the function word yi with special reference to The Confucian Analects. (Advisor: Frank Feng-sheng Hsueh)
• Wu, Sue-mei. 1997 Ph.D. diss. The coverbs in Classical Chinese. (Advisors: Frank Feng-sheng Hsueh and Yan-shuan Lao) (Marjorie K.M. Chan, Committee Member)

• Xu, Wang. 2006 M.A. thesis. A comparison of Chinese and Taiwan Sign Languages: Towards a new model for sign language comparison.   (Advisor: Marjorie K.M. Chan) (James H-Y. Tai, External Committee Member)
• Yan, Jing. 2008 Ph.D. diss. Social variation of Vernacular Written Cantonese in Guangzhou (Canton City), China.   (Advisor: Marjorie K.M. Chan)

• Yang, Seojin. 2023 Ph.D. diss. Language, gender, and identity: The case of sajiao communication style. (Advisor: Marjorie K.M. Chan) (Mineharu Nakayama & Zhiguo Xie, Committee Members)
• Yang, Yan. 2003 M.A. thesis. Ne in the novel Honglou Meng (Dream of the Red Chamber): Gender, social status and a sentence-final particle.   (Advisor: Marjorie K.M. Chan)
• Ye, Jinwei. 2021. M.A. thesis.   Cross-categorical intensification: The case of Cantonese -gwai2. (Advisor: Zhiguo Xie) (Marjorie K.M. Chan, Committee Member)
• Ye, Xuan. 2023. M.A. thesis. Flowers of Shanghai : A dialectology perspective on the 1998 film . (Advisor: Marjorie K.M. Chan) (Patricia Sieber, Committee Member)
• Zhou, Lieting. 1994 M.A. thesis. On the occurrence conditions of localizers in Mandarin Chinese. (Advisor: James H.-Y. Tai) (Marjorie K.M. Chan, Committee Member)

Theses & Disserations with Chinese Linguistics Topics in Other OSU Units (1965 –  )

• Ao, Benjamin Xiaoping. 1993 Ph.D. diss. Phonetics and phonology of Nantong Chinese. (Advisor: David Odden, Linguistics; DEALL Committee Member: Marjorie K.M. Chan)
• Chang, Chiung-Yun. 2010 Ph.D. diss. Dialect differences in the production and perception of Mandarin Chinese tones. (Advisor Robert Fox, Speech and Hearing Sciences; DEALL Committee Member: Marjorie K.M. Chan)
• Dai, Xiang-ling. 1992 Ph.D. diss. Chinese morphology and its interface with syntax. (Advisor: Arnold M. Zwicky, Linguistics; DEALL Committee Member: James H-Y. Tai)
• Dong, Xinran. 2009 Ph.D. diss. Requests in academic settings in English, Russian and Chinese. (Advisor: Daniel E. Collins, Slavic & East European L & L; Co-Advisor: Marjorie K.M. Chan, DEALL)
• Elliott, Dale Eugene. 1965 M.A. thesis. Interrogation in English and Mandarin Chinese . (Advisor: Charles J. Fillmore/William S-Y. Wang (?), Linguistics)
• Fon, Yee-Jean Janice. 2002 Ph.D. diss. A cross-linguistic study on syntactic and discourse boundary cues in spontaneous speech. (Advisor: Keith Johnson, Linguistics)
• Gao, Qian. 2001 Ph.D. diss. Argument structure, HPSG, and Chinese grammar. (Advisor: Carl J. Pollard, Linguistics)
• Gomes, Skylor Evan. 2020 M.A. thesis. Chinese government response to the 2019 Hong Kong Protests: A corpus-based lexical study. (Interdiscplinary M.A. in East Asian Studies, EASC; Advisor: Marjorie K.M. Chan, DEALL)
• Hashimoto, Anne Yue. 1966 Ph.D. diss. Embedding structures in Mandarin. (Advisor: William S-Y. Wang, Linguistics)
• Hashimoto, Mantaro J. 1965 Ph.D. diss. P honology of Ancient Chinese. (Advisor: William S-Y. Wang, Linguistics)
• Huang, Shuan-Fan. 1966 M.A. thesis. Subject and object in Mandarin. (Advisor: William S-Y. Wang, Linguistics)
• Huang, Shuan-Fan. 1971 Ph.D. diss. A study of adverbs. (Advisor: Charles J. Fillmore, Linguistics)
• Huang, Tsan. 2004 Ph.D. diss. Language-specificity in auditory perception of Chinese tones. (Advisor: Keith Johnson, Linguistics; DEALL Commmittee Member: Marjorie K.M. Chan)
• Hung, Tsun-Hui. 2011 Ph.D. diss. One music? Two musics? How many musics? Cognitive ethnomusicological, behavioral, and fMRI study on vocal and instrumental rhythm processing. (Advisor: Udo Will, Music; DEALL Commmittee Member: Marjorie K.M. Chan)
• Lee, Gina. 1993 Ph.D. diss. Comparative, diachronic and experimental perspectives on the interaction between tone and vowel in standard Cantonese. (Advisor: Brian Joseph, Linguistics; DEALL Committee Member: Marjorie K.M. Chan)
• Li, Fangfang. 2008 Ph.D. diss. The phonetic development of voiceless sibilant fricatives in English, Japanese and Mandarin Chinese. (Advisor: Mary E. Beckman, Linguistics)
• Lin, Hwei-Bing. 1982 M.A. thesis. Comparison of the differences in tone sandhi among slow speech, normal speech and fast speech in Mandarin Chinese. (Advisor: Robert A. Fox, Linguistics)
• Lin, Yuhan. 2018. Ph.D. diss. Stylistic Variation and Social Perception in Second Dialect Acquisition. (Advisor: Kathryn Campbell-Kibler; DEALL Committee Member: Marjorie K.M. Chan)
• Lu, Hsiao Tung. 1972 Ph.D. diss. The verb-verb construction in Mandarin Chinese. (Advisor: Arnold M. Zwicky, Linguistics)
• Lu, Xiaofei. 2006 Ph.D. diss. Hybrid models or Chinese unknown word resolution. (Advisor: Detmar Meurers, Linguistics; DEALL Committee Member: Marjorie K.M. Chan)
• Pan, Ho-hsien. 1994 Ph.D. diss. T he voicing contrasts of Taiwanese (Amoy) initial stops: Data from adults and children. (Advisor: Robert A. Fox, Speech and Hearing Science)
• Peng, Shu-hui. 1995 Ph.D. diss. Phonetic implementation and perception of segmental coarticulation and tone sandhi. (Advisor: Mary E. Beckman, Linguistics) (Marjorie K.M. Chan was a Committee Member from DEALL but was unable to attend the oral defence.)
• Riha, Helena. 2008 Ph.D. diss. Lettered words and Roman letter characters in Chinese writing: A study of alphabetic writing in Chinese newswires. (Advisor: Mary E. Beckman, Linguistics; DEALL Committee Member: Marjorie K.M. Chan)
• Sheu, Ying-yu. 1990 Ph.D. diss. Topics in a Categorial Theory of Chinese syntax. (Advisor: David Dowty, Linguistics; DEALL Commmittee Member: James H-Y. Tai)
• Shih, Barbara Mei. 1966 M.A. thesis. Negation in Chinese. (Advisor: Charles J. Fillmore, Linguistics)
• Shih, Ya-ting. 2012 Ph.D. diss. Taiwanese-Guoyu bilingual children and adults’ sibilant production patterns. (Advisor: Leslie C. Moore, Teaching and Learning, Education; DEALL Committee Member: Marjorie K.M. Chan)
• Thompson, Sandra A. 1965 M.A. thesis. English and Mandarin Chinese: Definite and indefinite determiners and modifying clause structures. (Advisor: Charles J. Fillmore, Linguistics)
• Thompson, Sandra A. 1969 Ph.D. diss. On relative clause structure in relation to the nature of sentence complexity. (Advisor: Charles J. Fillmore, Linguistics)
• Unkefer, James Bruce. 1982. Hakka Chinese tones: An acoustic and perceptual study. M.A. thesis. Advisor Robert Fox, Linguistics)
• Wong, Wai Yi Peggy. 2006 Ph.D. diss. Syllable fusion in Hong Kong Cantonese spontaneous speech. (Advisor: Mary E. Beckman, Linguistics; Co-Advisor: Marjorie K.M. Chan, DEALL)
• Xu, Lei. 2007 Ph.D. diss. Phonological variation and word recognition in continuous speech. (Advisor: Shari Speer, Linguistics; DEALL Committee Member: Marjorie K.M. Chan)
• Yan, Qingyang. 2017 Ph.D. diss. Factors influencing generalization and maintenance of cross-category imitation of Mandarin regional variants. (Advisor: Cynthia Clopper, Linguistics)
• Yang, Jing. 2013 Ph.D. diss. Acoustic properties of vowel production in Mandarin-English bilingual and corresponding monolingual children aged 3-7 years . (Advisor: Robert Fox, Speech and Hearing Sciences; DEALL Committee Member: Marjorie K.M. Chan)
• Zhang, Jennifer Qian. 2016. Ph.D. diss. Nonsibilant fricative acquisition by bilingual Guoyu-Taiwanese Southern Min children. (Advisor: Mary Beckman)
• Zhang, Zheng-sheng. 1988 Ph.D. diss. Tone and tone sandhi in Chinese. (Advisor: Arnold Zwicky, Linguistics; DEALL Committee Member: Marjorie K.M. Chan)
• Zhu, Yuhong. 2023 Ph.D. diss. Tone, metrical structure and intonation in Suzhou Chinese: Data, theory, typological implications. (Advisor: Björn Koehnlein, Linguistics; DEALL Committe Member: Marjorie K.M. Chan)

        Missing any entries?

Former Graduate Students in the M.A. Non-Thesis Option of the Graduate Program in Chinese Linguistics, Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures (DEALL), OSU

• Cao, Huiyi. (M.A. 1992) – Advisor: Marjorie K.M. Chan
• Choi, Bumyong. (M.A. 2004) – Advisor: Marjorie K.M. Chan
• Choi, Ho Jung. (Au 2005 – Sp 2006) – Advisor: Marjorie K.M. Chan
• Frerichs, Warren. (Au 1999 – Wi 2001) – Advisor: Marjorie K.M. Chan
• He, Yi. (M.A. 2008) – Advisor: Marjorie K.M. Chan
• Huan, Sha (M.A. 2017) – Advisor: Zhiguo Xie
• Jiang, Ping. (M.A. 1987) – Advisor: Frank Hsueh (?)
• Peng, Rui. (M.A. 1999) – Advisor: Marjorie K.M. Chan
• Zheng, Rongbin (M.A. 2009) – Advisor: Marjorie K.M. Chan

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Home > STUDENT-SCHOLARSHIP > Theses > HONORS_THESES > 613

Honors Theses

The syntax of passives and related constructions in mandarin chinese.

Shangyan Pan , Bucknell University Follow

Date of Thesis

Spring 2022

Description

This thesis discusses the Mandarin Chinese passive, a construction that differs in significant ways from its better known, European counterparts. While the passive is one of the most well-studied constructions in syntax, the passive in Chinese remains understudied and not as well understood. The thesis offers an analysis of multiple passive markers in Chinese, focusing on bei and gei . Superficially, the two markers both participate in passive and passive-like constructions. However, upon closer scrutiny, it is demonstrated that only bei qualifies as a true passive marker, while gei is shown to belong to a more general category of Non-Active Voice, which is elaborated in the thesis. It is demonstrated that bei and gei differ significantly in their distribution. While bei is used strictly in those environments that allow the passive cross-linguistically, gei distributes more broadly, across a range of non-active constructions that are incompatible with the passive voice. It is argued that bei and gei , and possibly other functional verbal markers, are simply instantiations of a more general Non-Active Voice in Chinese. A main goal of the thesis is to provide a formal, structural definition of Non-Active Voice, which unifies bei and gei constructions under a single structural description that makes a unique contribution to a more general Voice typology.

syntax, passive, Mandarin Chinese, Voice

Access Type

Honors Thesis

Degree Type

Bachelor of Arts

Languages, Cultures & Linguistics

Minor, Emphasis, or Concentration

Mathematics

First Advisor

James E. Lavine

Second Advisor

Heidi Lorimor

Recommended Citation

Pan, Shangyan, "The Syntax of Passives and Related Constructions in Mandarin Chinese" (2022). Honors Theses . 613. https://digitalcommons.bucknell.edu/honors_theses/613

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• I wrote my thesis on literacy strategies for boys .
• Her main thesis is that children need a lot of verbal stimulation .

(Translation of thesis from the Cambridge English-Chinese (Simplified) Dictionary © Cambridge University Press)

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Computational Generation of Chinese Noun Phrases

Public Defence: 12 April 2022 at 10:15. Academiegebouw, Domplein 29.

[PDF]   [DOI]

The linguist James Huang categorized languages into “cool” languages (i.e., languages that rely more on context) and “hot” languages (i.e., languages that rely less on context). Mandarin is thought to be a textbook example of “cool” languages, far “cooler” than languages such as English and Dutch; Huang hypothesised that the intended meaning of Mandarin phrases depends more on context than that of their English counterparts, and, therefore, that phrases in Mandarin are more likely to be omitted or under-specified than in English if their contexts provide enough information for readers to infer their meanings. James Huang originally introduced coolness in connection with the use of anaphora. Mandarin is “cool” since its pronouns are often more naturally omitted than English. For example, if someone asks, “Did John see Tom yesterday?”, a Mandarin speaker could simply answer “看见了。” (kanjianle, saw) to say “He saw him”, dropping pronouns in both the subject position and the object position. By contrast, the English word “saw” cannot form grammatically correct sentence on its own. In later work, the notion of coolness has been linked to the clarity-brevity trade-off in the use of language. It has been suggested that speakers of “cool” languages tend to keep their utterances shorter but less clear than speakers of “hot” languages. This suggestion would make the impact of coolness on language use very extensive. In this thesis, we decided to focus on noun phrases and aim at understanding and validating the “coolness” hypothesis on Mandarin noun phrases.

We approached this issue with the help of Natural Language Generation Techniques. Specifically, we conduct experiments to find out what Mandarin speakers say in a given situation, compare this with what English speakers say, check whether the outcomes are in line with the coolness hypothesis, and build natural language generation models to re-produce these speakers’ behaviour. Computational models help us understand better how people speak. Conversely, understanding human speaking patterns can help us build more mature practical natural language generation systems for Mandarin.

We were curious about two types of noun phrases. One is referring expression. Suppose Tom is the only student on the bus and he wears glasses. On the bus, there are 20 other people and 3 of them wear glasses. To refer to Tom, one can use the referring expression “the student” which rules out all other things (e.g., other people, chairs, etc.) on the bus. The other is quantified expressions. To describe the situation of people in the aforementioned bus using a quantified expression, one could say “Only one student is on the bus.”

In this thesis we link the phenomena we observed during our studies to the coolness hypothesis. Although most of the evidence that we found supports coolness, we also identified some counter-evidence. This suggests that coolness holds true in certain situations but not always.

We hope our work will pave the way for computational investigations of other differences between languages, and that it will inspire better natural language generation systems for Mandarin.

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Form and meaning in chinese : an analysis of mandarin syntax after the becker-platt model of tagmemics, year of award, department, school or centre, degree type, campus location, usage metrics.