Despite the complexity and variation of physical signals, human perception of a speech sound uttered by different talkers or in diverse contexts is amazingly constant. Nonetheless, the neurocognitive mechanisms of this fundamental human perceptual ability are not well understood. Even less is known about the neural bases of phonetic constancy. We present an emerging picture of this important issue based on accumulating behavioral as well as neuroimaging evidence from lexical tone studies. Lexical tone offers a useful test of various existing theories proposed based on segmental studies, because of its variable and dynamic nature. We draw evidence from a series of studies on the perceptual normalization of lexical tones to shed light on prior theories. We also discuss findings from neuroimaging studies which advance our understanding of the temporal and spatial neural signature of phonetic constancy in lexical tone perception. A new model is proposed which emphasizes that listeners extract and integrate information from multiple sources in a fast and robust manner, to help them achieve phonetic constancy.

This chapter aims to provide a careful examination of Mandarin Chinese classifiers from a syntactic perspective. A comprehensive overview of the distribution of classifiers is provided along with their syntactic analyses. A central conclusion of this chapter, following much recent work, is that there are two distinct structural configurations that numeral classifiers participate in, and that these structures can distinguish the type of classifier participating in the structure as well as its semantic interpretation. The syntactic analyses are complemented with formal semantic analyses of numeral classifiers.

After critically reviewing the conflicting theories of word-formation, the integral model in Li 2005 is presented which is shown not only to make a minimal number of postulations but also to cover a wide range of cross-linguistic facts: morphological causativization in Bantu and Semitic, compounding in Chinese and English, the resultative constructions in Chinese, and noun-incorporation in Amerindian. Underlying this chapter is the long-lasting debate in this part of linguistic theorization as well as the methodological implications of the integral solution.

This chapter explores the morphological poverty of the Chinese from an empirical perspective. Until recently, the nature of affixation in Chinese is still not well recognized and has been one of the hotly debated topics in Chinese morphology. Based on the CKIP Morphological Database (incl. 4025 “affixes” in Chinese), this chapter covers the issue of the lack of affixation in Chinese based on a range of linguistic facts and empirical arguments such as lack of productivity and irregularities in word-formation rules.

While Chinese is widely considered a topic-prominent language and 'topic' may be a useful notion for describing some of the unique grammatical features of Chinese, natural text/speech data call for a re-examination of its nature and the ways in which it is manifested and deployed in discourse. My multiple genre-based investigation shows that at a ratio of 4 percent to all clauses, topic constructions are a very rare type of construction in Chinese discourse among all the possible types of syntactic constructions. As such, the status of topic constrictions in Chinese needs to be rethought. An examination of the use of topic constructions in spontaneous conversation shows a number of surprising patterns, including: (1) topic is best described as located at speaker turn transition places; (2) topical elements are subject to speaker negotiation, so they do not have to be definite, identifiable, or shared at the time of the utterance; and (3) topical elements function quite differently in interaction depending on whether they are self-initiated, self-repeated, or other-initiated.

There is a common view that English has word stress but Chinese does not. I examine perceived stress in disyllabic lexical entries and show two similarities between the languages: (i) when both syllables carry a designated tone, such as such as bamboo or Red Cross in English, or 北京 Beijing ‘Beijing’ in Chinese, main stress is unclear to native speakers; and (ii) when just one syllable has a designated tone, such as yoga, magpie, or about in English, or 爸_爸 ba_ba [paː][pə] ‘pa_pa (papa)’ in Chinese, it is clearly perceived to carry main stress. However, case (ii) covers 86% of disyllabic entries in English but just 5% in Chinese. The difference is attributable to the independent fact that Chinese is a tone language, in which syllables with secondary stress also carry a designated tone, whereas in English they usually do not. I also show that English and Chinese share two further similarities: First, stressed and unstressed syllables are acoustically different, and second, stress plays other phonological roles, such as phrasal stress, contrastive stress, and meter in poetry.

The primary function of language is to convey what we mean for communication. Semantics, a subfield of linguistics, aims to understand how meanings are encoded and operate in different levels of linguistic forms (such as morphemes, words, phrases, sentences, and discourses). The cumulative evidence thus far has mainly been based on native speaker intuitions about the meanings of linguistic forms in language usage. With recent breakthroughs in neuroimaging techniques, neurolinguistic research has been used to test and evaluate theories put forth by theoretical linguistics by measuring the brain activity underlying language processes. This chapter reviews a series of neurolinguistics studies that took N400, an event–related potentials (ERPs) component to index the semantic processing, to investigate how the brain processes meaning conveyed by Chinese radicals, characters, classifiers, and the leading context of sentences. These findings make essential contributions to the growing understanding of when and how meanings are extracted, represented, and processed in the brain for language comprehension.

This chapter reviews and discusses issues involving the case theory in the generative framework of syntax with data from Chinese, a language without overt morphological case marking. Specifically, it addresses the interrelationship of abstract case, morphological case, and the thematic roles of NPs; the association between the distribution of NPs and case positions; and the possibility of overt vs. covert arguments and the finite tense. The data presented here highlight the variety of ways in which language facts can be described. The challenges to case theory arise not only from the morphological realization of cases on NPs, but also from the flexibility of the number of NPs that can be associated with a given verb, the flexibility of thematic roles associated with a verbal event, and the optionality of word order, as well as the possibility of overt subjects in non-finite clauses. Amid the advancement of cross-linguistic observations, Universal Grammar may eventually inform a holistic account of human languages, in which case theory is superseded by a more fine-grained mechanism for argument-thematic mapping, together with more careful consideration of information structure.

The canonical word order of Modern Chinese is SVO, and yet Modern Chinese does not demonstrate the patterns of a typical VO language. This chapter reviews representative arguments that have contributed to our closer understanding of what pragmatic and semantic factors condition word order variation in Modern Chinese. Discourse analyses in relation with information structure account for the pragmatic function of the preverbal object and why there is the relative ordering between subject and object in non-canonical SOV/OSV patterns, based on the notion of topicality, focus, and emphatic/contrastive function. Semantic accounts explain how the animacy of subject and object constrains the obligatory vs. optional ba marking of object in the SOV pattern and the acceptability of the OSV pattern. Finally, arguments based on iconicity principle and lexical aspect analyses are used to account for the relative ordering of verb and locative/temporal adverbials.

This chapter synthesizes the alternation patterns in the morphophonology of Chinese affixation, and analyzes rime change (变韵 biànyuùn) mutation-like phenomena in terms of featural affixation. The main goal is to demonstrate that the paucity of affixation in Chinese languages/dialects does not render Chinese alternations less relevant to typological and theoretical pursuits. Two areas of morphophonology are examined to illustrate how phonetics/phonology interact with morphology under Chinese affixation: unexpected affixed outputs and the phonological realizations of featural affixes. Case studies of unexpected morphophonological outputs and unfaithful parsing of some root/affix features are reviewed, and the seemingly exceptional cases are explained by preservation of phonological/phonetic contrasts within the root-diminutive morphological paradigm and/or by morphological, prosodic and segmental principles and restrictions. An overview of the typology and characteristics of Chinese featural affixes is presented. The analytical approach rests on the theoretical underpinnings of non-linear phonology, the item-and-arrangement morphological model, and the notion of contrast preservation.

The debate on modern Chinese being SVO or SOV is facing a dilemma: the word order is SVO in an unmarked declarative sentence in Chinese, while Chinese exhibits many features shared by SOV languages. To tackle this difficult situation, researchers should focus on language types, but not the relative orders of subject, verb, and object. Based on the usage of modern Chinese, we have checked ten universals generalized in Greenberg (1963) which are relevant to this topic. It is shown that 90% of the universals support Chinese being a SOV language, and only one universal is on the SVO side. Modern Chinese is therefore argued to be located very close to the SOV end of a continuum.

Case theory is a theoretical tool in the generative grammar to capture generalizations regarding categorial distribution, particularly the nominal category in relation to others. The notion of case can describe the close relation between grammatical categories, such as a verb/preposition and its object, or the subject of a sentence and the tense or agreement of the sentence. This chapter reviews the advantages of adopting the notion of abstract case in Chinese, a language without overt morphological case marking. Data and issues discussed include how the challenges Chinese poses to the word order correlations proposed as universals or tendencies in typological studies cease to be problems if the notion of abstract case interacts with word order universals, what the postverbal structure constraint is in Chinese, and how Case plays a role in the analysis, whether there are true pre-nominal PPs in Chinese, and whether tensed and non-tensed clauses can be distinguished in Chinese, as well as the role of case in capturing the behavior of clauses.