Estudo da relação entre os judeus cultivados de Berlim (na figura de Rachel Varnhagen) e a cultura clássica alemã por meio da análise do papel nela representado pela idéia de “personalidade”, senha da ideologia dos mandarins alemães.

Estudo da relação entre os judeus cultivados de Berlim (na figura de Rachel Varnhagen) e a cultura clássica alemã por meio da análise do papel nela representado pela idéia de "personalidade", senha da ideologia dos mandarins alemães.

Contributors to the 2016 Special Issue of Discourse Studies on the ‘Epistemics of Epistemics’ claim that studies of epistemics in interaction have lost the ‘radical’ character of groundbreaking work in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. We suggest that the critiques and related writings are a kind of mandarin EM, lacking an adequate definition of ‘radical’, other than to invoke brief and by now familiar statements from Garfinkel and Sacks regarding the pursuit of ‘ordinary everyday activities’ and the avoidance of ‘formal analysis’. (...) Drawing on Egon Bittner’s work, we further suggest that the EoE group shares properties and problems common to social movements claiming the mantle of radicalism. Because of their particular focus on CA and Harvey Sacks’ early work, we also demonstrate that Sacks was not, as asserted, preoccupied with the singularity of occasions. Rather, from his earliest available work, Sacks pursued trans-situational aspects of sequential organization, and documented these not only through single cases but also through the comparative analysis of specimen collections. We conclude by considering how EM and CA are compatible endeavors, both in their engagement with traditional research topics – or what Garfinkel called ‘asymmetric alternates’ – and in their appreciation of generic features implicated in the assembly of social actions and social worlds. This implies a relationship of mutual interchange between EM and CA. (shrink)

Simone de Beauvoir is a representative of one of the leading philosophical schools in the middle of the 20th century. The article presents Beauvoir’s artistic method, applied in her novel The Mandarins, and examines the theoretical and biographical sources of the novel. The author demonstrates the place that the novel has in the Beauvoir’s literary and philosophical heritage and reveals the genre features of the work, introducing some special terms such as engaged, modern or philosophical novel and testimonial autobiographical (...) project. The article also analyzes the novel’s literary form and the binary structure of the narrative. The study of the main characters, who are Henri Perron, Anne Dubreuilh and her husband Robert, allows to give a couple of narrative lines. First of them is the inner line that opens the reflective, contemplative and intimate life of one of the main characters – Anne. The second one is the outer line that means that the reader receives the information about characters from the Henry’s actions. Basing on this structure, we draw a conclusion about the modifications in the genre of existential novel in the postwar years. The new themes can be found in the literature. Authors introduce to readers the certain social reality through the inner life of some characters – intellectuals, novelists or philosophers. The thesis about the inner transformation of the genre is proved on Beauvoir’ and Jean-Paul Sartre’s works and on the prewar works of Sartre and Albert Camus. Beauvoir’s new literary methods and plots, which are the logical development of her work, made her novel one of the pioneers in the postwar literature. (shrink)

Given the controversies over Mandarin Chinese in terms of Talmy’s bipartite language typology, this paper presents an exhaustive study of Chinese motion verbs collected from two authoritative dictionaries, namely, The Ancient Chinese Dictionary (2nd Edition) and The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary (7th Edition). An analysis of 662 motion verbs in ancient Chinese and 693 motion verbs in modern Chinese indicates that Mandarin Chinese has undergone a typological shift from verb-framed to satellite-framed as far as the lexicalization pattern is concerned. The typological (...) shift seems to have been driven by two forces, the decline of monosyllabic motion verbs and the upsurge of disyllabic motion verbs, which, upon second thoughts, can be boiled down to a single but predominant process of disyllabification in Chinese, whereby two (former) roots that bear a wide range of syntactic relations are lexicalized into a disyllabic word. Thus, we see an intriguing case of how phonology and morphosyntax interact to impact the typological properties of a language. (shrink)

Mandarin focus particles systematically have heterogeneous uses. By examining details of two focus particles jiu ‘only’ and dou ‘even’, this paper explores the hypothesis that varieties of alternatives give rise to systematic ‘ambiguities’. Specifically, by positing sum-based alternative sets and atom-based ones, it maintains unambiguous semantics of jiu as onlyweak and dou as even, while deriving their variability through interaction with alternatives. Independently motivated analyses of distributive/collective readings and contrastive topics, combined with varieties of alternatives, deliver the full range of (...) facts concerning jiu and dou. Theoretically, the paper illustrates an integration of Link, Landman’s theory of pluralites into Rooth’s alternative semantics. (shrink)

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) reportedly struggle with the comprehension of aspect. However, since aspect and tense are closely entangled in the languages spoken by the children with DLD in previous studies, it is unclear whether the difficulty stems from aspect, tense, or both. Mandarin Chinese, a language without morphological manifestations of tense, is ideal to investigate whether the comprehension of aspect is specifically affected in children with DLD, yet to date work on this is scarce and presents methodological (...) limitations. In this study, we examined whether preschool Mandarin-speaking children with DLD have difficulty in comprehending perfective aspect (represented with the aspect marker -le) compared to imperfective aspect (represented with the aspect markerszai-and -zhe), whether performance can be explained in terms of the pre- vs. post-verbal realization of the aspect markers, and the potential role played by lexical aspect in the comprehension of grammatical aspect. Fourteen preschool children with DLD (mean age: 61.11 months old) and 14 TD children (mean age: 63.4 months old) matched for age and nonverbal intelligence participated in a sentence-picture matching task. Global results showed that, similar to their TD peers, children with DLD performed better on imperfective aspect than perfective aspect. Concerning specific aspect markers, while children with DLD indeed performed similarly to TD children on imperfective-zhe, they obtained significantly lower accuracy than TD children on perfective-leand imperfectivezai-. However, considering verb types combined with these aspect markers, results revealed that children with DLD scored significantly higher on the prototypical combination(s) (e.g.,zai- + Activity verbs) than on the non-prototypical combination(s) (e.g.,zai- + Accomplishment verbs). The performance pattern suggests that the comprehension of aspect markers by children with DLD is particularly affected by lexical aspect. As this also affects younger TD children, children with DLD are arguably at an earlier stage of aspectual development than their age and nonverbal intelligence matched TD peers. Therefore, the aspectual development of children with DLD appears to be delayed rather than deviant. Given this, language programs addressing difficulties in DLD may need to incorporate training on the use of aspect markers, especially targeting their combination with non-prototypical verbs. (shrink)

Este artigo discute algumas variantes de relevo na língua alemã na crítica à modernidade. Em rigor, discute-as na sua pertinência actual, tal como se deixa ver em dois trabalhos recentes de autores portugueses, Rafael Gomes Filipe e Alexandre Franco de Sá. O nó-górdio da questão encontra-se na caracterização da modernidade através da elaboração de uma filosofia da His­tória, problema que sobressai na análise de Nietzsche e Weber por Gomes Filipe e no ensaio schmittiano de Franco de Sá.

In this essay I shall consider the different perspectives adopted by the characters in Simone de Beauvoir's Les Mandarins on literature, its relation to politics and the role of the writer in society. Far from being outdated, the questions of whether literature should be politically committed and to what extent works of literature can be said to effect social change are still central to our attempts to navigate contemporary culture. Addressing these questions in Les Mandarins, I argue that (...) Beauvoir's work remains topical and offers important insights into the role of the writer and the place of literature in Western culture. (shrink)

Previous work has shown that English native speakers interpret sentences as predicted by a noisy‐channel model: They integrate both the real‐world plausibility of the meaning—the prior—and the likelihood that the intended sentence may be corrupted into the perceived sentence. In this study, we test the noisy‐channel model in Mandarin Chinese, a language taxonomically different from English. We present native Mandarin speakers sentences in a written modality (Experiment 1) and an auditory modality (Experiment 2) in three pairs of syntactic alternations. The (...) critical materials are literally implausible but require differing numbers and types of edits in order to form more plausible sentences. Each sentence is followed by a comprehension question that allows us to infer whether the speakers interpreted the item literally, or made an inference toward a more likely meaning. Similar to previous research on related English constructions, Mandarin participants made the most inferences for implausible materials that could be inferred as plausible by deleting a single morpheme or inserting a single morpheme. Participants were less likely to infer a plausible meaning for materials that could be inferred as plausible by making an exchange across a preposition. And participants were least likely to infer a plausible meaning for materials that could be inferred as plausible by making an exchange across a main verb. Moreover, we found more inferences in written materials than spoken materials, possibly a result of a lack of word boundaries in written Chinese. Overall, the fact that the results were so similar to those found in related constructions in English suggests that the noisy‐channel proposal is robust. (shrink)

The surface grammar of reports such as ‘I have a pain in my leg’ suggests that pains are objects which are spatially located in parts of the body. We show that the parallel construction is not available in Mandarin. Further, four philosophically important grammatical features of such reports cannot be reproduced. This suggests that arguments and puzzles surrounding such reports may be tracking artefacts of English, rather than philosophically significant features of the world.

Simple Mandarin Chinese texts translated into Update with Centering. Notes toward a directly compositional fragment of Mandarin Chinese, combining Categorial Grammar with Update with Centering, to appear in Bittner (in prep.) "Temporality: Universals and Variation".

This article presents an account of temporal understanding in Mandarin Chinese. Aspectual, lexical, and adverbial information, and pragmatic principles all contribute to the interpretation of temporal location. Aspectual viewpoint and situation type give information in the absence of explicit temporal forms. The main, default pattern of interpretation is deictic. The pragmatic principles are the Bounded Event Constraint, the Simplicity Principle of Interpretation, and the Temporal Schema Principle. Lexical and adverbial information can lead to non-default interpretations. Two other temporal patterns, narrative (...) dynamism and anaphora, appear in text passages that realize the 'discourse modes' of narrative and description. (shrink)

In this paper we examine how English and Mandarin speakers think about time, and we test how the patterns of thinking in the two groups relate to patterns in linguistic and cultural experience. In Mandarin, vertical spatial metaphors are used more frequently to talk about time than they are in English; English relies primarily on horizontal terms. We present results from two tasks comparing English and Mandarin speakers’ temporal reasoning. The tasks measure how people spatialize time in three-dimensional space, including (...) the sagittal (front/back), transverse (left/right), and vertical (up/down) axes. Results of Experiment 1 show that people automatically create spatial representations in the course of temporal reasoning, and these implicit spatializations differ in accordance with patterns in language, even in a non-linguistic task. Both groups showed evidence of a left-to-right representation of time, in accordance with writing direction, but only Mandarin speakers showed a vertical top-to-bottom pattern for time (congruent with vertical spatiotemporal metaphors in Mandarin). Results of Experiment 2 confirm and extend these findings, showing that bilinguals’ representations of time depend on both long-term and proximal aspects of language experience. Participants who were more proficient in Mandarin were more likely to arrange time vertically (an effect of previous language experience). Further, bilinguals were more likely to arrange time vertically when they were tested in Mandarin than when they were tested in English (an effect of immediate linguistic context). (shrink)

Time is a fundamental domain of experience. In this paper we ask whether aspects of language and culture affect how people think about this domain. Specifically, we consider whether English and Mandarin speakers think about time differently. We review all of the available evidence both for and against this hypothesis, and report new data that further support and refine it. The results demonstrate that English and Mandarin speakers do think about time differently. As predicted by patterns in language, Mandarin speakers (...) are more likely than English speakers to think about time vertically (with earlier time-points above and later time-points below). (shrink)

This paper investigates the effects of 10 factors on the choice between alternative ba sentences and SVO sentences in Mandarin Chinese. These factors are givenness, definiteness, animacy and pronominality of NP2s, NP2 length, VP length, verb sense, syntactic parallelism, dependency distance, and surprisal. Using corpus data and mixed-effects logistic regression modeling, we find that on the one hand, givenness, syntactic parallelism, and the log-transformed ratio of NP2 length and VP length are significant predictors of the choice between ba sentences and (...) SVO sentences. A new NP2, a large length ratio and a parallel construction predict an SVO sentence rather than a ba sentence. On the other hand, dependency distance and surprisal estimated by the trigram model are effective in predicting the choice between naturally occurring ba/svo sentences and their alternatives. Naturally occurring sentences are more likely to have shorter dependency distances and smaller surprisal values than the converted sentences. The effects of these five factors on syntactic choice are congruent with results of previous studies, which suggests that some determinants of syntactic choice are shared among languages. (shrink)

This article advocates reading Les Mandarins taking into account, first of all, that it is a novel, leaving aside the familiar theories that it is a roman-à-clef, a roman-à-thèse, a biographical chronicle, or all three. It considers the novel's setting, point of view, plot and character in relation to political activism, love relationships, the literary vocation, as well as its metaphysical framework. I argue that this approach leads to a more complete understanding of the novel's multi-layered world, avoiding the (...) distracting and misleading nature of those theories. I conclude by stating that Beauvoir's own defence of her work confirms such a reading. (shrink)

While the language of Běijīng served together with Manchu as the court vernacular in the Qīng dynasty, the city’s dialect was not widely accepted in China as the standard for Guānhuà even in the late nineteenth century. The preferred form was a mixed Mandarin koiné with roots going back much earlier, such as that represented in Lǐ Rǔzhēn’s mid-Qīng rime compendium Lǐshì yīnjiàn. A similar form of mixed Mandarin served briefly as the National Pronunciation of China in the early twentieth (...) century and came to be called lán-qīng Guānhuà ‘blue-green Mandarin’. This heterogeneous norm incorporated features of a variety of Mandarin dialects and eventually came to be disparaged as an unrefined cousin of the pure Běijīng standard. Yet in origin the old National Pronunciation was designed to encompass a mix of regional forms and intended to contain the most broadly accepted elements of various Mandarin types. The evolution and development of the composite Guānhuà norm reveal much about Chinese linguistic attitudes of the early nineteenth through early twentieth centuries and shed light on various perspectives about what standard Chinese should be and what a Mandarin-based norm should represent. Broad popular acceptance of Běijīng as the governing norm for pronunciation began slowly to take hold only after the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China finally officially promoted Běijīng as the national standard in the 1930s. Yet it then had to compete with a new mixed vernacular orthography called Latinxua sinwenz. Běijīng was not firmly established as the norm until the People’s Republic of China definitively declared the city’s dialect as standard in the 1950s. (shrink)

O texto busca apresentar a recepção da céle-bre peça de Shakespeare em solo alemão, as-sim como as consequências que essa leitura teve em diferentes momentos do que se con-vencionou chamar de Goethezeit.

IN LE P È R E GO R I O T, Balzac has the main character, Rastignac, ask his friend Bianchon whether he would agree to the killing of a Chinese Mandarin in far-away China if this would yield Bianchon a great fortune. After some joking, Bianchon answers negatively.1 For Rastignac, this thought experiment is connected to a practical dilemma: he is deliberating whether to agree that a man he has never seen, and who has done Rastignac no harm, should (...) be killed so that he, Rastignac, may enjoy the wealth that the man’s sister, who loves Rastignac, will inherit. (shrink)

This paper offers a compositional analysis of Mandarin universal _wh_’s in construction with an additive/scalar adverb _ye_ ‘also/even’. In the analysis, universal force is derived from exhaustification of the subdomain alternatives activated by _wh_-items under stress, and the tendency of _wh_-_ye_ to appear in negative sentences is explained by the interaction between _ye_ and domain widening. Specifically, the _ye_ in _wh_-_ye_ is argued to be a scalar _ye_ imposing a total order presupposition on its associated set of alternatives. In _wh_-_ye_ (...) it associates with the domain argument of the _wh_, and the requirement can be met by either an ordered _wh_ or a two-point scale \(\langle D',D \rangle \) made available through domain widening, specifically by widening of QUDs. The negative preference follows from the fact that a QUD is most naturally widened when it is settled negatively, as in the case of negatively biased questions with minimizers/maximizers. (shrink)

This study investigates the phonological development of Mandarin voiceless affricates produced by Mandarin-speaking children. Thirty-six monolingual Mandarin-speaking children and twelve adults participated in a speech production task. Auditory-based transcription analysis and acoustic analysis were utilized to quantify the relative order of affricate acquisition. Both methods yielded earlier acquisition of alveopalatal affricates at age three than retroflex and alveolar affricates, whereas they differed in the acquisition order of retroflex and alveolar affricates. The former revealed that both retroflex and alveolar affricates were (...) acquired at age five, regardless of aspiration, while the latter yielded earlier acquisition of retroflex than alveolar affricates. Possible reasons for the discrepancy are discussed in relation to the different nature of the two methods. Overall, the observed acquisition order of Mandarin voiceless affricates suggests that child speech development is a complex process, and is influenced by various factors including oromotor maturation and language-specific phoneme frequencies in the ambient language. (shrink)

Ever since Charles Goodwin’s seminal works on gaze, there has been a long-standing interest in Conversation Analysis in the interrelationship between talk and bodily conduct in the accomplishment of social action. Recently, a small but emerging body of research has explored the ways in which embodied conduct figures in the organization and operations of repair. In this article, I take up a similar theme and investigate the interaction between talk and iconic gestures in same-turn self-initiated repair in Mandarin conversation. The (...) phenomenon I examine concerns the use of what I call “gestural repair.” The analysis focuses on how such repair can intertwine with talk in multi-stage operations in the progressivity and resolution of repair. The data are drawn from 50 hours of naturally-occurring conversations collected in China. Some unique features of such gestural repair observed in the Mandarin data are also discussed. (shrink)

Quantifier Raising usually exhibits finite-clause boundedness due to the syntactic and semantic constraints it is subject to (Fox 1995, 2000, Cecchetto 2004, a.o.). In this paper, I argue that QR out of a Mandarin prenominal pre-determiner RC is not only properly licensed, obeying both syntactic and semantic constraints, but also needed to account for the exceptional-scope effects observed across relative clause boundaries (Huang 1982, Aoun and Li 1993, a.o.). I further consider constructions where the exceptional-scope effects are not present, including (...) relative clauses containing the focus-sensitive operator _dou_ and full-sized subject RCs, and show that the absence of the exceptional-scope effects in these constructions follows directly from the proposed analysis. (shrink)

The paper reports two studies investigating children’s acquisition of the wh -adjunct zenme in Mandarin. Unlike other Mandarin wh -words that correspond to a single meaning, zenme can be used to question either the manner or the cause of an event. Study 1 explored whether children understand that zenme is ambiguous between a causal and a manner reading. Study 2 examined whether they can use syntactic cues to disambiguate the two readings. The findings show that children as young as 4 (...) years of age access both the manner and the causal reading, but they prefer the former over the latter. Children exhibit a developmental trajectory when acquiring the mapping relations between the syntactic positions of zenme and its corresponding semantic interpretations: 5-year-olds can use syntactic cues to disambiguate the two readings; 3-year-olds, however, are still in the stage of working out how the syntactic positions are mapped onto the relevant semantic interpretations; the critical change occurs at around 4 years of age. The implications of the findings were then discussed in relation to the two major competing theories of child language acquisition. (shrink)

I propose that Mandarin ｡-sentences (units marked by ｡) are aspectual topic-comment sequences, where an initial update (terminating in a pause) introduces a topic state for comment by one or more clauses. Each comment anaphorically refers to the topic state via the aspect feature of the verbal predicate. This proposal explains why Mandarin ｡-sentences have controversial boundaries, since speakers may disagree where one topic state ends and the next one begins. It also explains various manifestations of aspect-prominence and topic-prominence in (...) Mandarin discourse. In Bittner (2014), this proposal is formally implemented in Categorial Grammar and a new dynamic logic called Update with Centering. (shrink)

Yang (2004) observes that in Mandarin, an initial possessor phrase (PossessorP) may be followed by a bare noun as in (1), or by a possessee phrase that can be headed by a numeral and classifier, [Numeral + CL + N], as in (2) or by a demonstrative, [Dem + (Numeral) + CL + N] as in (3). (In all the examples in this section, we begin with Yang’s own initial glosses and translations3. The interpretation of the examples will be probed (...) after they have been presented.). (shrink)

Unlike adjunct wh’s-in-situ, argument wh’s-in-situ do not seem to be subject to island constraints in Chinese and other East Asian languages. This difference in island sensitivity between argument and adjunct wh’s-in-situ is known as argument–adjunct asymmetry in the theoretical literature. Recently, this long-established asymmetry is challenged by a formal judgment study. It was claimed in the study that this asymmetry is an illusion and both argument and adjunct wh’s-in-situ are subject to island constraints. The present study demonstrates that such a (...) claim is not convincing because it is based on problematic experimental design. We designed two experiments to test the island effects on Chinese wh’s-in-situ. The results reaffirm that the argument–adjunct asymmetry in Chinese wh’s-in-situ is indeed present, contrary to the findings of previous formal judgment study, and they also corroborate our assumption that when object wh’s-in-situ like shénme ‘what’ are located inside a relative clause, they are subject to a pragmatic constraint, suggesting that the VP in the relative clause tends to describe the prominent/salient feature of the relativized nominal head. (shrink)

Spoken word recognition involves a perceptual tradeoff between the reliance on the incoming acoustic signal and knowledge about likely sound categories and their co-occurrences as words. This study examined how adult second language (L2) learners navigate between acoustic-based and knowledge-based spoken word recognition when listening to highly variable, multi-talker truncated speech, and whether this perceptual tradeoff changes as L2 listeners gradually become more proficient in their L2 after multiple months of structured classroom learning. First language (L1) Mandarin Chinese listeners and (...) L1 English-L2 Mandarin adult listeners took part in a gating experiment. The L2 listeners were tested twice—once at the start of their intermediate/advanced L2 language class and again two months later. L1 listeners were only tested once. Participants were asked to identify syllable-tone words that varied in syllable token frequency (high/low according to a spoken word corpus) and syllable-conditioned tonal probability (most probable/least probable in speech given the syllable). The stimuli were recorded by 16 different talkers and presented at eight gates ranging from onset-only (gate 1) through onset+40 ms increments (gates 2 through 7) to the full word (gate 8). Mixed-effects regression modeling was used to compare performance to our previous study which used single-talker stimuli (Wiener, Lee, & Tao, 2019). The results indicated that multi-talker speech caused both L1 and L2 listeners to rely greater on knowledge-based processing of tone. L1 listeners were able to draw on distributional knowledge of syllable-tone probabilities in early gates and switch to predominantly acoustic-based processing when more of the signal was available. In contrast, L2 listeners, with their limited experience with talker range normalization, were less able to effectively transition from probability-based to acoustic-based processing. Moreover, for the L2 listeners, the reliance on such distributional information for spoken word recognition appeared to be conditioned by the nature of the acoustic signal. Single-talker speech did not result in the same pattern of probability-based tone processing, suggesting that knowledge-based processing of L2 speech may only occur under certain acoustic conditions, such as multi-talker speech. (shrink)

According to the Interface Hypothesis in the field of bilingualism, the interface connecting a linguistic module with a language-external domain (e.g., syntax-discourse) will present prolonged difficulties for adult bilingual learners, as compared with the interface connecting language-internal modules (e.g., syntax-semantics). This study tested whether the Interface Hypothesis is applicable to the acquisition of Mandarin Chinese as a heritage language. An internet-based acceptability judgment task (AJT) was administered to 58 advanced and intermediate adult Chinese heritage speakers to collect data in accuracy (...) and reaction time to investigate the adult heritage speakers’ mastery of referential nominal expressions regulated at the syntax-semantics and syntax-discourse interfaces, respectively, in Mandarin Chinese. The target linguistic phenomena involved three nominal expressions (i.e., the bare N(oun), the [Cl(assifier)-N], and the [Num(eral)-Cl-N]) under four interface-regulated referential readings (i.e., type-denoting, quantity-denoting, indefinite individual-denoting, and definite individual-denoting). In terms of accuracy, the results showed that (i) for the N and the [Num-Cl-N], regardless of the interface type, the advanced group acquired the target phenomena to a nativelike level, who significantly outperformed the intermediate group; (ii) for the [Cl-N], the advanced group exhibited nativelike attainment at the syntax-discourse interface but not at the syntax-semantics interface, and performed significantly better than the intermediate group at both interfaces. Regarding reaction time, no significant differences were reported between the advanced group and the native group for the target structures at either the syntax-semantics or the syntax-discourse interface, while the advanced group performed significantly better than the intermediate group, regardless of the interface type and the structure type. The findings suggest that the nature of the language interface, i.e., whether it pertains to language-external domains (i.e., the external interface) or not (i.e., the internal interface), should not be a reliable factor for predicting the (im)possibility of nativelike attainment of bilingual grammar knowledge, contra the predictions of the Interface Hypothesis. The present study provides new empirical evidence to show that language-external interface properties are not necessarily destined for prolonged difficulties in heritage language acquisition, and that it is possible for adult heritage speakers to make developmental progress in both accuracy and processing efficiency at different types of interfaces. (shrink)

L(ow) tone in Mandarin Chinese causes both downstep and post-low-bouncing. Downstep refers to the lowering of a H(igh) tone after a L tone, which is usually measured by comparing the H tones in a “H…HLH…H” sentence with a “H…HHH…H” sentence (cross-comparison), investigating whether downstep sets a new pitch register for the scaling of subsequent tones. Post-low-bouncing refers to the raising of a H tone after a focused L tone. The current study investigates how downstep and post-low-bouncing interact with focus and (...) phrasing in Mandarin Chinese. In the experiment, we systematically manipulated (a) the tonal environment by embedding two syllables with either LH or HH tone (syllable X and Y) sentence-medially in the same carrier sentences containing only H tones; (b) boundary strength between X and Y by introducing either a syllable boundary or a phonological phrase boundary; and (c) information structure by either placing a contrastive focus in the HL/HH word (XF), syllable Y (YF), or the sentence-final word (ZF). A wide-focus condition served as the baseline. With systematic control of focus and boundary strength around the L tone, the current study shows that the downstep effect in Mandarin is quite robust, lasting for 3–5 H tones after the L tone, but eventually levelling back again to the register reference line of a H tone. The way how focus and phrasing interact with the downstep effect is unexpected. Firstly, sentence-final focus has no anticipatory effect on shortening the downstep effect; instead, it makes the downstep effect lasts longer as compared to the wide focus condition. Secondly, the downstep effect still shows when the H tone after the L tone is on-focus (YF), in a weaker manner than the wide focus condition, and is overridden by the post-focus-compression. Thirdly, the downstep effect gets greater when the boundary after the L tone is stronger, because the L tone is longer and more likely to be creaky. We further analyzed downstep by measuring the F0 drop between the two H tones surrounding the L tone (sequential-comparison). Comparing it with F0 drop in all-H sentences (i.e., declination), it showed that the downstep effect was much greater and more robust than declination. However, creaky voice in the L tone was not the direct cause of downstep. At last, when the L tone was under focus (XF), it caused a post-low-bouncing effect, which is weakened by a phonological phrase boundary. Altogether, the results showed that although intonation is largely controlled by informative functions, the physical-articulatory controls are relatively persistent, varying within the pitch range of 2.5 semitones. Downstep and post-low-bouncing in Mandarin Chinese thus seem to be mainly due to physical-articulatory movement on varying pitch, with the gradual tonal F0 change meeting the requirement of smooth transition across syllables, and avoiding confusion in informative F0 control. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Why Not Kill a Mandarin?:An ExchangeAmihud GileadIn a powerful and well-written thought experiment, Iddo Landau attempts to persuade us that "people cannot be trusted... people... such as ourselves need to be well supervised... there are important advantages in fearing others, in hesitating to be real individuals, and in constantly apprehending what 'they' will say."1Following Balzac, Landau's thought experiment echoes, to some extent, Plato's myth of Gyges's ring in the (...) Republic (359d ff. and 612b). One of the lessons the reader may draw from this myth is that not only fear but shame also plays a crucial role in human morality. With no shame, without the fear of being caught in a shameful act or deed, people would behave much less morally than they actually do. Like Plato's Socrates, mentioning the gods, the supreme judges in Hades,2 Landau relates his idea also to the belief in God (p. 93). Note also that Socrates's view of morality is compatible with the view that each human being is nothing but smikron, a trifle (Symposium 210b8). Plato's Socrates entertains no false ideas about the alleged "human individuality."A similar logic leads Landau to conclude about the moral requirement "in hesitating to be real individuals," or, better, really autonomous individuals. Thus this conclusion also hints critically against Kantian autonomous morality. As if, contrary to Kant, Landau suggests that in order to behave morally, respecting the moral law or value is certainly less than enough. Instead, he argues, we have to fear what others will say about our behavior and preferences and, while behaving immorally, we [End Page 153] should be ashamed of ourselves in the eyes of other people; otherwise we would not be moral beings at all. All other motives, however sublime, are not sufficient to make us moral beings. Landau regards self-deception or simply wistful thinking of any attempt at thinking otherwise (p. 94), namely, that other motives (such as the respect for the moral law) are sufficient to behave morally. Landau's view is prudent, realistic, and powerful, but, nonetheless, annoying. I have a strong feeling that he is wrong, and this feeling of mine, I believe, does not rest upon self-deception or wishful thinking about humanity; it relies instead upon insight that is backed by sound argument.Why a fairly ordinary person, one of us, would not like to kill a Mandarin, who has done no harm to any of us and who is a completely remote stranger, a lonely person whose death would not change any one else's life but instead would benefit that ordinary person a lot? Suppose, like Landau's thought experiment, that no one, absolutely no one, not even omniscient God, if He exists at all, would know even a little bit about the intention, let alone the deed, of any such potential murderer who can be any human being. What could be his or her reason, as sufficient motive, not to kill the Mandarin after all, even if such a murder would change the life of the potential murderer enormously for the better?We have to explicate Balzac-Landau's thought experiment slightly in order to realize its failure. I call this explication "the mutual effect presupposition" (or, if you like, "the reflexive effect presupposition"). Actually, the thought experiment presupposes it for, if the wish or consent of the potential ("wishful") murderer can cause the Mandarin's death which, in turn, benefits the potential murderer immensely, they are both under the mutual effect presupposition. The problem is that Landau and others appear to be unaware of the moral significance or implication of this presupposition. According to it, given that if I can wish for the Mandarin's death and cause it by means of this wish, then someone, sharing the same world with me, may wish for my own death and may bring it about by means of such a wish alone, provided that absolutely no one knew about such a wish. Would I accept that? Would the potential murderer accept a possible situation in which he would be the Mandarin whom somebody else would like to murder for the... (shrink)

This study investigated the second language (L2) processing and acquisition of Chinese temporality, specifically the interaction of grammatical and lexical aspects. An experimental group of 31 English-speaking learners of Chinese and a control group of 29 native speakers of Mandarin Chinese completed an online sentence-picture matching task and an offline translation task. Results from these experiments demonstrated the prototype effect: In aspectual development, perfective aspect started with telic verbs and progressive aspect started with activity verbs, in accordance with the Aspect (...) Hypothesis, both for online processing and offline comprehension. The prototype effect of the grammatical aspect was evident for activity verbs but less so for accomplishment verbs in the L2 group across tasks, and this was explained through language-specific properties and L2 learners’ instructional input. In addition, L2 proficiency and working memory capacity were found to modulate these processes. (shrink)