World Chineses and Their Grammatical Variations: Empirical Studies based on Comparable Corpora
(GRF Project No. 543512)

Introduction

The term World Chineses (全球華語), though not as common as World Englishes, is becoming more and more widely used with the increasing popularity of Chinese as a second language and with the Chinese diaspora spreading and growing. The lexical variations among World Chineses, such as region­specific neologism (new words), meaning variations of the same word, and the use of different words to express the same meaning, are easily observed and often studied. However, such studies are typically based on incidental observations and lacks in both coverage and rigor to give a systematic account of the core and variable properties of World Chineses. The availability of comparable corpora (i.e. two or more corpora with similar topics and coverage) of different variants of Chinese enabled corpus­studies of such lexical variations and heralded many possibilities of research on World Chineses. For instance, the LIVAC synchronic Chinese corpus generated exciting and comprehensive studies on lexical variations among different Chinese communities and recently completed Chinese Gigaword Corpus offered additional possibilities. Yet, to better understand the dynamicity of World Chineses and how variants of World Chineses can overcome their differences to communicate efficiently, we need to study grammatical variations of World Chineses. In this study, we propose a comparable­corpus­based approach to study grammatical variations among three of the most dominant form of World Chineses: Mainland, Taiwan, and Hong Kong; while including Singapore Mandarin for some of the studies. An innovative statistical method for automatic comparison and extraction of possible patterns of grammatical variations is adopted. Such variations are then carefully studied by linguists to offer explanatory generalizations and to make possible predictions. We will focus on three sets of constructions anchored by verbs: light verb constructions, VO compounds, and aspectual markers. All grammatical variations will be documented and generalizations will be given. Our study will be the first such comprehensive study of World Chineses and will shed light on how typological characteristics of Mandarin Chinese and its unique orthography contribute to and restrict possible variations. We also expect results of our study to be incorporated in the proposed World Chinese Dictionary.

Research Team

Principal Investigator:

Prof. Chu-ren Huang, Chair Professor of Applied Chinese Language Studies, Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Co-investigators:

Dr Lin, Jingxia.

Prof Lu, Jianming.

Prof Shi, Dingxu.

Dr Zhang, Huarui.

PhD Student:

Ms. Menghan Jiang, PhD Candidate, Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

(Last Modified: Feb 20, 2015)