Linguistics Colloquium Speaker: Gabriel Antunes de Araujo
Thursday, October 20, 2022 4:30pm to 5:30pm
About this Event
The Department of Linguistics proudly presents Gabriel Antunes de Araujo, Programme Coordinator of Master in Philosophy in Portuguese Language and Intercultural Studies at University of Macau. Dr. Araujo will speak on "A Mandarin templatic language game".
Language games are linguistic phenomema common in all languages. Basically, they have the following characteristics: the morphophonological system is limited to one or more mutually non-exclusive operations (infixation/affixation, templatic manipulation, reversal, and substitution); inserted affixes are limited to one or at most a handful of items, and the morphology is semantically empty. Here, we described a templatic language game in Mandarin. In addition, we analyzed its morphophonological aspects, such as syllables, tones, and compound integrity, from a generative linguistics point of view. Our investigation revealed that this Mandarin’s templatic language game allows the insertion of playful particles —such as le 了and de 的, among others —in the inner limits of an utterance, undoing the integrity of lexical compounds and the noun-classifier pair. In this way, a sequence as ai4爱 chi¹ 吃 luo² 萝 bo卜 he² 和 qing¹ 青cai4 菜‘they like to eat radishes and vegetables’becomes the playful sequence ai4爱 le 了 chi¹ 吃 le 了 luo² 萝 le 了 bo² 卜 le 了bo² 和 le 了 qing¹ 青 le 了 cai4 菜, with the insertion of the semantically empty particle le 了. In this example, the integrity of the compound luo² 萝 bo卜 ‘radishes’is undone by the insertion of the game’s particle. In the game output, additionally, a rising tone, bo²卜, is added to the second component in the compound luo² 萝 bo² 卜, originally toneless. Thus, from a linguistic point of view, the game allows us to address several issues in Mandarin, such as the tone attribution system, the integrity of syllables, and the nature of the lexical composition. Likewise, the description and analysis of this game allow us to compare it with other language games in an interlinguistic manner. Therefore, this presentation constitutes
an original contribution to understanding language game phenomena in general and Mandarin in particular.
Automatic captioning will be available for this talk.
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