1. Some basic facts Chinese is a Sino-Tibetan language that is spoken by about 1.3 billion people, i.e.

about one-fifth of the worlds population. It is also one of the six working languages of the United Nations. (For a family tree of Sino-Tibetan languages, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SinoTibetanTree.svg) English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family. (For a family tree of Indo-European languages, see http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/linguistics/pie2.gif). It is a global language and the leading language of international discourse. In terms of population, English is probably the third most natively spoken language in the world, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. (For a list of top languages, see http://web.archive.org/web/19990429232804/www.sil.org/ethnologue/top100.html ) The Chinese language is called (Hny, literally Han language) in Chinese because it is spoken by the Han people, the largest ethnic group in China. Chinese has a number of dialects, which share the same written form but can be mutually unintelligible when spoken. The dialects are traditionally categorized into seven groups: (1) Mandarin (Northern); (2) Min (Fujian and Taiwan); (3) Xiang (Hunan); (4) Gan (Jiangxi); (5) Wu (Jiangsu, Shanghai, and Zhejiang); (6) Hakka (Guangdong, Guangxi); (7) Yue (Guangdong). As for English, aside from its two major dialects, i.e. British English and American English, there are numerous other varieties of English, which include, in most cases, several subvarieties (e.g. Newfoundland English within Canadian English; African American Vernacular English and Southern American English within American English. This course concerns English and Standard Mandarin, which is spoken by about 850 million people. Standard Mandarin is based on the Beijing dialect and is called Ptnghu () in Mainland China, which literally means common language. In Taiwan, Mandarin is referred to as Guy (); in Singapore, it is called Hu y (). Chinese/Mandarin distinguishes itself from most other languages by being tonal and having a special writing system, which employs Chinese characters ( hnz). These characters are logograms in that each symbol represents one meaningful unit of the language as well as one syllable.

2. Typological characteristics of Mandarin and English 2.1 Tonal or not Along with many contiguous languages of Southeast Asia, Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language. In languages of this type, each syllable is characterized by a fixed pitch pattern; such pitch movement may be level (neither rising nor falling), or it may be a contour (rising, falling, or some combination of the two). Tones are phonemic, in that they may serve to differentiate meaning just like consonantal and vocalic segments. Standard Chinese has four tones: the first has a high-level pitch, the second is high rising, the third low falling-rising, and the fourth begins at high pitch and falls abruptly (Norman 1988: 9). There are four tones in Mandarin Chinese: The first tone or the level tone ( ynpng); The second tone or the rising tone ( yngpng); The third tone or the falling-rising tone ( shngshng); The fourth tone or the falling tone ( qshng). The four tones: Chinese Pronunciation

1st tone (level) m mom b eight d to build up

2nd tone (rising) m hemp b to pull out d to answer

3rd tone (falling-rising) m horse b target d to hit 2

4th tone (falling) m to scold b dad d big

In addition to the four tones, there also exists a neutral tone ( qngshng) in Mandarin Chinese. Neutral tone words include those which do not have fundamental tones (e.g. the question particle ma), and those which do have tones when pronounced individually, but are not stressed in certain compounds (e.g. the second ba in bba father). A neutral tone is pronounced briefly and softly, and its pitch value is determined by the stressed syllable immediately before it. Pinyin: There are many systems of transcribing Chinese in the Latin alphabet. Today the most common romanization standard for Mandarin is Hny Pnyn (), often known simply as Pnyn. Pinyin was approved in 1958 and adopted by the government in Mainland China in 1979. It is a very useful tool for learning the pronunciation of characters and looking up words in dictionaries. Pinyin is a very regular system. In this system, a Mandarin syllable is composed of an initial and a final. Initials consist of consonants or semi-vowels; finals consist of vowels or vowels plus one of these two nasal sounds: -[n] or -[ng]. There are 21 initials and 35 finals in Mandarin. In addition to an initial and a final, there is a tone to each Chinese syllable.

2.2 Isolating language or not? In traditional typological schemes, Chinese has been considered the preeminent example of an isolating or analytic language. By this it is meant that in Chinese the word was by and large coterminous with the morpheme, and that grammatical relationships were shown either by word order or by the use of independent grammatical particles, rather than by affixes or by internal changes in the word itself. This is a reasonably accurate way of describing Chinese at all of its historical stages. Modern Chinese dialects have developed a very small number of quasisuffixes which function as grammatical determinatives, but grammatical relationships are still mostly shown by word order and by particles. (Norman 1988: 10; emphasis added) A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit in a language. E.g. uncontrollable In Mandarin and other dialects of Chinese, a typical word is not made up of component parts, called morphemes, but is, rather, a single morpheme (Li & Thompson 1981: 10). there is very little morphological complexity in any of the Chinese languages. When we compare the relatively rich inventory of suffixes and prefixes found in languages such as Latin, Turkish, Ojibwa, and even English, however, it is clear that Mandarin is quite striking in its general lack of complexity in word formation. Such a language has been referred to as an isolating language, a language in which it is 3

generally true that each word consists of just one morpheme and cannot be further analyzed into component parts. (Li & Thompson 1981: 11) Unlike English and many other languages, Chinese has very few prefixes and suffixes to form a complex word. On the other hand, modern Chinese has a great number of compound words similar to such compounds as street light and wool sweater in English. (Lin 2007: 5) jiedeng, maoyi However, [t]he characterization of Chinese as being monosyllabic fits much better with classical Chinese where over 90 percent of words are monosyllabic. In modern Chinese, however, 95 percent of morphemes are monosyllabic, but about half or more than half of the words are polysyllabic and consist of more than one morpheme (cf. Chen 1999: 138-9). (Lin 2007: 5; emphasis added) [Chen, Ping. 1999. Modern Chinese: History and sociolinguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ] Therefore, by the criterion of one-morpheme-one-word, Chinese is not that isolating, and neither is English in this respect. The richness of a language with respect to these types of morphemes, called inflectional morphemes [e.g. a suffix indicating plurality], is what determines whether a language is classified as isolating (Li & Thompson 1981: 13; emphasis added). Morphemes occurring with nouns (e.g. case markers, number markers) o Case markers: Many languages have morphemes that signal the grammatical function the noun has in the sentence: subject, direct object, indirect object, adverb, and so on. In Mandarin, of course, such functions are generally expressed by means of word order and prepositions. (Li & Thompson 1981: 11). (1) a. John-ga Mary-ni hon-o John-NOM Mary-DAT book-ACC John gave Mary a book. b. John-ga Mary-ni tegami-o John-NOM Mary-DAT letter-ACC John sent a letter to Mary. age-ta. give-PAST okut-ta. send-PAST

o Number markers: Mandarin: does not need to mark number (with the exception of pronouns); if necessary, using a separate word: yxi some; x du many

Morphemes occurring with verbs o Agreement markers: Many languages mark verbs morphologically to agree with the noun class into which the subject or direct object falls. This agreement usually indicates whether the subject or the direct object is first person, second person, or third person, singular or plural. (Li & Thompson 1981: 12) Mandarin does not have any such agreement markers. The agreement system in English is weak. o Tense and aspect markers: Most languages have morphemes for signaling the time of a reported event relative to the time of speaking (tense) or the duration or completion of a reported event relative to other events (aspect) (Li & Thompson 1981: 12) (2) a. I am walk-ing. (present tense; progressive aspect) b. I walk-ed. (past tense)

Mandarin has no markers for tense, though it does have aspect morphemes, including: (3) -le -guo -zhe perfective experienced action durative

By the criterion of richness in inflectional morphemes, Chinese can be classified as an isolating language, and English can be regarded as a fairly isolating language.