Ling Lunch talk: Panpan Yao "How syntactic cues affect Mandarin speakers’ anticipation of mass/count nouns" | Tuesday 8 March 2016

8 March 2016

Time: 3:40pm
Venue: Scape 1.05

Panpan Yao

Queen Mary, University of London

How syntactic cues affect Mandarin speakers’ anticipation of mass/count nouns

Abstract:

It is a common awareness that there exist two kinds of objects in the natural world, one is objects which have discrete and individual units by nature, and the other one is substances and materials which are always independent of a particular shape or size. It is interesting to investigate how this cognitive mass/count distinction mapped into varied languages across the world.

In Numeral-languages like English, the mass/count distinction can be easily discovered by the overt grammar of nouns, articles and quantifiers. In Classifier-languages like Mandarin, however, there is no obvious grammatical features to reveal the mass/count distinction. It is debatable how is the mass/count distinction encoded in Mandarin. Some researchers argued that the mass/count distinction is encoded in lexicons (Doetjes, 1997), some suggested that it should be in the classifier level (Cheng & Sybesma, 1998), and some also proposed that it is the syntactic structures which give the mass/count meanings to nominals (Borer, 2005; Muromatsu, 2003).

In order to look into how and where the mass/count distinction encodes in Mandarin Chinese, and how native Mandarin speakers take advantage of the mass/count distinction during their on-line processing, we conducted two eye-tracking experiments on native Mandarin speakers. We used reading for comprehension task in experiment 1 and visual world paradigm in experiment 2. We found that the Cl/Adj order is a very implicit but efficient syntactic cue which could be used by native Mandarin speakers to parse the mass/count nominal phrases during on-line processing.