The lexemes ‘fruit’ and ‘stone’ are known as the origins of the numeral classifiers for small round objects in many Tibeto-Burman languages. This paper employs a correlation-based network construction method to investigate the colexification networks of the two concepts in 58 + 68 Tibeto-Burman languages. A total of 104 concepts colexified with ‘fruit’ and 99 concepts colexified with ‘stone’ are organized into macro semantic classes. Semantic networks on the basis of the similarities in colexification patterns of concepts, as well as languages networks on the basis of the similarities in colexification patterns of languages, are constructed for ‘fruit’ and ‘stone’, respectively. The results indicate that classifiers for small round objects evolved from either ‘fruit’ or ‘stone’ are directly colexified with class terms in compound nouns denoting varieties of fruits/stones and the shape class of small round objects, indicating that they are diachronically related. However, ‘fruit’ and ‘stone’ differ significantly in their modes of deriving a classifier. Moreover, languages that have developed classifiers from ‘fruit’ are mostly from the Ngwi subgroup, whereas languages whose classifiers are colexified with ‘stone’ evolved independently.
This study compares Verb-Noun compounds (V-NCs) with synthetic compounds (SCs) in three languages: English (e.g., killjoy vs. joy-killer ), German (e.g., Wendehals , Spielverderber ), and Italian, which exclusively displays the former construction (e.g., guastafeste ). We adopt a theoretical framework grounded in naturalness to examine various features of these compound types. From a synchronic perspective, we analyze: (a) their agentive versus instrumental meanings, (b) their preference for endocentricity versus exocentricity, (c) their degrees of productivity and morphosemantic transparency, (d) the iconicity between morphosemantic and morphotactic heads, (e) their uniqueness versus ambiguity, and (f) the influence of typological properties on their formation in each language. From a diachronic perspective, we explore the genesis and development of these compound patterns, as well as the role of analogy in their formation, frequency, and productivity. Typological differences among the three languages reflect either a preference for one pattern or the coexistence of both, albeit with varying degrees of productivity. Through the lens of analogy, we identify compound families in all three languages, demonstrating the extension of patterns and the potential to predict new formations accordingly.
The effect of being multilingual on learners’ foreign language anxiety (FLA) is not always clear-cut. In view of related controversy on the issue and the negative impact of language conflict on learners’ foreign language learning in multilingual areas, this study takes trilingual learners – the Chinese Dongxiang ethnic group – as the subject, and adopts a mixed methods approach to explore their FLA and how language conflict in learners’ environment affects FLA. The study finds that FLA of Dongxiang undergraduates is much higher than that of Han undergraduates with the same English proficiency level. Besides, with the Dongxiang language, Chinese, English, and Arabic serving different functions in the participants’ learning-lives, the potential conflicts between the Dongxiang language and Chinese, Arabic and English, Chinese and English are contributing factors in triggering participants’ FLA. Based on the results, some pedagogical implications are discussed in light of language planning.
This study contributes to the similarities and differences of the constructions in the family of Chinese instrumental constructions. It is found that all instrumental constructions conceptually are composed of the instrument-manipulation event, the act-on event and a semantic relation (facilitating or causative) between them and syntactically represented by one clause, while with different patterns of event integration, all instrumental constructions form a continuum in terms of degrees of event integration and Chinese tends to use more compactly integrated instrumental constructions. Theoretically, this study supplements the event integration from 4 aspects: (1) Event integration can be either single-chained or double-chained; (2) Besides explicit argument integration, implicix`t argument integration is also a hub of event integration; (3) Event integration involves not only explicit events but also implicit events; (4) The mismatch between predicates and arguments is essentially one of the linguistic representations of event integration.
