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"Chinese language New words."
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The emergence of the modern Sino-Japanese lexicon : seven studies
The seven essays that comprise this volume address the actual processes by which a discreet number of terms in modern Chinese and Japanese came into being, how they outdistanced all competitors, and the persons and texts involved in the process.
eBook
An editable learner model for text recommendation for language learning
Extracurricular reading is important for learning foreign languages. Text recommendation systems typically classify users and documents into levels, and then match users with documents at the same level. Although this approach can be effective, it has two significant shortcomings. First, the levels assume a standard order of language acquisition and cannot be personalized to the users’ learning patterns. Second, recommendation decisions are not transparent because the leveling algorithms can be difficult for users to interpret. We propose a novel method for text recommendation that addresses these two issues. To enhance personalization, an open, editable learner model estimates user knowledge of each word in the foreign language. The documents are ranked by new-word density (NWD) – that is, the percentage of words that are new to the user in the document. The system then recommends documents according to a user-specified target NWD. This design offers complete transparency as users can scrutinize recommendations by reviewing the NWD estimation of the learner model. This article describes an implementation of this method in a mobile app for learners of Chinese as a foreign language. Evaluation results show that users were able to manipulate the learner model and NWD parameters to adjust the difficulty of the recommended documents. In a survey, users reported satisfaction with both the concept and implementation of this text recommendation method.
Journal Article
Language Change and Morphological Processes in Contemporary Chinese: The Case of 健康码 (Health QR Code)
The Chinese language has witnessed remarkable changes in the past several decades, marked by a rapid rise of new words, frequent innovation of pseudo-affixes, and a notable increase in word length. By analyzing the creation, spread, and expansion of the new word 健康码 Jiankang-ma “health QR code”, this study sheds light on how language change takes place and how nonce formation is brought into being. Following the explosion of COVID-19 in China, 健康码 Jiankang-ma “health QR code” was created and promoted by the local and central governments and subsequently generated a large XX-码 XX-ma “XX-code” word family through various morphological processes, such as abbreviation, clipping, derivation, and analogy, where -码 -ma “-code” has acquired some new meaning distinct from its original form as a bound root. Linguistically, 健康码 Jiankang-ma “health QR code” is a three-morpheme word in a 2 + 1 length pattern, which phonologically consists of a single super foot that makes the expression catchy and appealing. The highly productive AB-C internal structure makes -码 -ma “-code”, although not yet a fully grammaticalized affix, a strong pseudo-suffix that has high morphological productivity with a fixed suffix positioning. Given the high frequency of the lexical 码 ma “code” in contemporary Chinese language use, the pseudo-suffix -码 -ma “-code” may, however, not completely replace it in the long run, as principles of grammaticalization theories predict. Instead, it is likely that both the lexical 码ma “code” and the pseudo-suffix -码 -ma “-code” will coexist side by side along split pathways.
Journal Article
Out-domain Chinese new word detection with statistics-based character embedding
Unlike English and other Western languages, many Asian languages such as Chinese and Japanese do not delimit words by space. Word segmentation and new word detection are therefore key steps in processing these languages. Chinese word segmentation can be considered as a part-of-speech (POS)-tagging problem. We can segment corpus by assigning a label for each character which indicates the position of the character in a word (e.g., “B” for word beginning, and “E” for the end of the word, etc.). Chinese word segmentation seems to be well studied. Machine learning models such as conditional random field (CRF) and bi-directional long short-term memory (LSTM) have shown outstanding performances on this task. However, the segmentation accuracies drop significantly when applying the same approaches to out-domain cases, in which high-quality in-domain training data are not available. An example of out-domain applications is the new word detection in Chinese microblogs for which the availability of high-quality corpus is limited. In this paper, we focus on out-domain Chinese new word detection. We first design a new method Edge Likelihood (EL) for Chinese word boundary detection. Then we propose a domain-independent Chinese new word detector (DICND); each Chinese character is represented as a low-dimensional vector in the proposed framework, and segmentation-related features of the character are used as the values in the vector.
Journal Article
On Expansion and Features of Word-formation between English and Chinese New Words
The most important tool for expressing thoughts and communicating information among people--- language has emerged some main changes as the development of modern science and technology. Thousands of new words have emerged in both English and Chinese. Their emergence reflects the new things; new thoughts and new ideas appeared in the fast developing society. This paper starts with the history of the study of word-formation, analyzes the main methods of word-formation of new words of English and Chinese, then compares their features of word-formation. Although English and Chinese belong to the different language system, their main methods of word-formation are the same. The reason leading to the distinction is the difference of each other’s culture, history and tradition. The biggest difference between them is: English is phonogram, but Chinese lays stress on matching the meaning. This also makes them show remarkable differences in absorbing and assimilating the loanwords. Using abundant examples and materials, the paper expounds the similarities and differences between them in different aspects, According to the study of these comparisons, it will do favor for us to find out English and Chinese new words’ features and their trend of development.
Journal Article
Schizophrenia, culture and neuropsychology: sensory deficits, language impairments and social functioning in Chinese-speaking schizophrenia patients
While 20% of schizophrenia patients worldwide speak tonal languages (e.g. Mandarin), studies are limited to Western-language patients. Western-language patients show tonal deficits that are related to impaired emotional processing of speech. However, language processing is minimally affected. In contrast, in Mandarin, syllables are voiced in one of four tones, with word meaning varying accordingly. We hypothesized that Mandarin-speaking schizophrenia patients would show impairments in underlying basic auditory processing that, unlike in Western groups, would relate to deficits in word recognition and social outcomes.
Altogether, 22 Mandarin-speaking schizophrenia patients and 44 matched healthy participants were recruited from New York City. The auditory tasks were: (1) tone matching; (2) distorted tunes; (3) Chinese word discrimination; (4) Chinese word identification. Social outcomes were measured by marital status, employment and most recent employment status.
Patients showed deficits in tone-matching, distorted tunes, word discrimination and word identification versus controls (all p<0.0001). Impairments in tone-matching across groups correlated with both word identification (p<0.0001) and discrimination (p<0.0001). On social outcomes, tonally impaired patients had 'lower-status' jobs overall when compared with tonally intact patients (p<0.005) and controls (p<0.0001).
Our study is the first to investigate an interaction between neuropsychology and language among Mandarin-speaking schizophrenia patients. As predicted, patients were highly impaired in both tone and auditory word processing, with these two measures significantly correlated. Tonally impaired patients showed significantly worse employment-status function than tonally intact patients, suggesting a link between sensory impairment and employment status outcome. While neuropsychological deficits appear similar cross-culturally, their consequences may be language- and culture-dependent.
Journal Article
A Major Difference between the Formation of English Words and the Formation of Chinese Words in Modern Times
The English language is a language of “fertility” due to its continuous formation of new words in modern times. However, the Chinese language is “infertile” because it has basically stopped creating totally new words. The general trend in the development of a Chinese character in the Chinese history has been moving from complexity to simplicity. As a result, it leads to the \"infertility\" of the Chinese language and makes it difficult to combine a limited number of different strokes within a limited space known as方块字Fāngkuàizì ‘Square Block Word’. What is a totally new word in English is simply a combination of used words in Chinese. The Chinese language's capability of saving horizontal and linear space makes this combination feasible to express a new meaning. Three types of constraint arising from limited type and number of Strokes, General Trend toward Simplicity and Square-Framed Space have made their concurrent contribution to the \"infertility\" of the Chinese word formation. The preference of the Chinese language for new combinations of used words over the creation of total new Chinese words in modern times constitutes a major difference between the formation of English words and the formation of Chinese words in modern times.
Journal Article
A Contrastive Analysis of Word Formation of English and Chinese Neologisms
Neologisms refer to the words created to express new things, new concepts and new ideas in written and oral communication. Since the 1980s, the world has entered into an information age. The world has witnessed great changes in political, economic, cultural field. At the same time, China has been carrying out a series of political and economic reforms, which have brought about amazing changes in all social aspects. As a result, a great deal of neologisms have appeared both in English and Chinese. There are three sources of neologisms both in English and Chinese: creating new words with native word elements, adding new meanings to existing words and borrowing new words from other languages. This paper focus on the first one of these three sources: word-formation, and analyzes the similarities and differences of three major ways of word-formation of neologisms in both English and Chinese: compounds, affixations, shortenings.
Journal Article
A USAGE-BASED APPROACH TO SUBSTRATUM TRANSFER: THE CASE OF FOUR UNPRODUCTIVE FEATURES IN SINGAPORE ENGLISH
This article discusses four grammatical constructions that have been appropriated from Chinese into Singapore English and spelled out with English morphosyntactic materials. These constructions have developed unique structural properties and usage patterns that differ in interesting ways from those of their respective Chinese sources and English exponents. While the structural properties of these constructions are shaped by the grammars of Chinese and English, the two languages with a constant presence in Singapore, the usage patterns are largely determined by the grammatical requirements associated with the English exponents. I argue that frequency of use in the contact language plays a crucial role in substratum-derived linguistic change, and propose a usage-based exemplar model of substratum transfer and stabilization that gives an adequate and cogent explanation of the facts discussed here.
Journal Article