A Typological Discussion of the Predicates Expressing Possessive Meaning “to have” in Taiwan Mandarin and Czech — a Learner Corpus-Based Study

ATypological Discussion of the Predicates Expressing Possessive Meaning “to have” in Taiwan Mandarin and Czech— aLearner Corpus-Based Study Melissa Shih-hui Lin ABSTRACT: The main purpose of this research paper is to investigate predicates expressing the possessive meaning “to have” in Taiwan Mandarin and Czech. In Taiwan Mandarin, the word you has the semantic meaning of “to have” and “to exist” (Huang, 1987; Her, 1991). Mít in Czech, however, has three main usages (Daneš, 1987; Karlík — Nekula — Rusínová, 1995; 1996; Čechová, 2000; Cvrček, 2010): it is used as amodal, an auxiliary or apossessive verb. According to the language data collected from Taiwanese students who study Czech, these students often use mít in Czech to express not only possession but also existence, or they incorrectly use it as an auxiliary— in other words— their knowledge of you in Taiwan Mandarin seems to interfere (Brown, 2007) with their usage of mít in Czech. In this paper, firstly, relevant literature dealing with the usages of you in Taiwan Mandarin and mít in Czech will be introduced; secondly, there will follow adiscussion of the language data collected from the NCCU foreign language learner corpus; thirdly, the grammaticalization theory (Heine, 1997) will be applied to investigate Taiwan Mandarin you and Czech mít, which shall offer anumber of explanations regarding the observable typological diversity across these two languages. In spite of the fact that there are similar research papers related to the expression of possessive meaning in these two languages, this paper assumes that the cross-linguistic typological discussion shall bring more insight into the characteristics of these two languages. Furthermore, apart from advancing the typological discussion of these two languages, it is expected that this paper will also aid the preparation of related textbooks and teaching materials. KEY WORDS: Czech, grammaticalization, learner corpus, possessive, Taiwan Mandarin, typology I. INTRODUCTION The main goal of this paper is to investigate you in Taiwan Mandarin and mít in Czech. The research is based on the data collected from the NCCU1 foreign language learner corpus2 in Taiwan, which was launched in 2009, currently including more than 4000 texts in eight languages: English, Japanese, Korean, French, Spanish, Arabic, Russian and Czech. “This corpus is composed of learners’ assignments in various forms written in the different languages collected by participating professors of this project. This corpus thus provides details of the linguistic features of Taiwanese students 1 National Chengchi University in Taipei, Taiwan. 2 The website of NCCU foreign language learner corpus is: <http://learnercorpus.nccu. edu.tw>. OPEN ACCESS MELISSA SHIH-HUI LIN 87 in their process of learning different foreign languages” (Chung — Wang — Tseng, 2010). One apparent fact which can be observed from the corpus data is that Taiwanese students display ahigh tendency to use Czech mít to not only express the meaning of possessive, but also that of existence, or they use it as an auxiliary. My hypothesis is that such tendencies are caused by interference from their L1, i.e. Taiwan Mandarin. Semantically, it is not difficult to understand the relation between the expression of existence and possession. Cross-linguistically, there is asubstantial empirical overlap between language structures used to express existence and those used to express possession. In fact, the affinity between possessive, existential, and locative constructions has been mentioned often in literature (Lyons, 1977; Clark, 1978). The empirical and conceptual affinity between existential and possessive constructions can be partly explained by the fact that existence is one of the source domains for possession, which will be further discussed in the fifth section of this paper. Apart from expressing possession and existence, nevertheless, these Taiwanese students also use the Czech word mít as an auxiliary as they would with the Taiwan Mandarin3 word you. Hence, one of the objectives of this paper is to interpret this phenomenon. In general, the focus of this paper is the semantic domain of the ways in which the Taiwan Mandarin word you causes interference for Taiwanese students learning the usages of the Czech word mít. However, to what extent does this interference function and how shall we further interpret it? These questions will be discussed in the fifth section of this paper. Before commencing the discussion, it is necessary to define “interference” in this paper. According to Brown (2007), the first language interfering with the process of second language acquisition is acommon occurrence; the process can be classified as follows: transfer, interference and overgeneralization. Overgeneralization is also called negative intralingual transfer: to generalize means to derive aparadigm or arule usually from the observation of particular instances. Transfer can be positive or negative. Positive transfer means to apply previous knowledge to language acquisition, while negative transfer, also called interference, implies the negative influence of the learner’s mother tongue. In this paper, the mistaken usages of the Czech verb mít are presumed to be caused by the interference of the mother tongue of these Taiwanese students, which, as discussed above, is the Taiwan Mandarin word you. This paper will begin with adescription of the general recognized usages of the Taiwan Mandarin word you and the Czech word mít, followed by adiscussion of the language data collected from the NCCU foreign language learner corpus, and finally ahypothesis from acognitive viewpoint will be proposed. II. YOU IN TAIWAN MANDARIN At the beginning of 20th Century, the Chinese government decided that the dialect of Chinese spoken in the Peking area, i.e. Peking Mandarin (Standard Peking Mandarin), would become the official language of China. To this day Peking Mandarin is 3 Here Taiwan Mandarin refers to the Mandarin variety used in Taiwan, which will be more systematically introduced in the second section of this paper. OPEN ACCESS 88 STUDIE ZAPLIKOVANÉ LINGVISTIKY 1/2017 still the official language in The People’s Republic of China and also in Taiwan. However, due to geographical and political factors, as well as the regional influence of local languages, there are differences between the Mandarin spoken in these two areas. According to Li and Thompson (1981), there are seven main language groups in China: Mandarin, Wu, Xiang, Gan, Hakka, Min, and Yue. The main local language spoken in Taiwan is Taiwanese, which belongs to one variety of Min, more specifically to southern Min. Geographically speaking, Taiwanese is asouthern variety of Chinese, whilst Peking Mandarin is anorthern one. There are great phonological differences between the two, and grammatically they are only partly similar. For example, both in Taiwanese and Peking Mandarin, the structures of clauses can be found under the construction of topic and comment (Yang, 1992; Li — Thompson, 1981). However, according to Chao (1991) and Li (1986), there are some obvious differences between the two variants. For Taiwanese and Peking Mandarin, “although they share acommon ancestor, a‘universal’ writing system and also the claim of ahomogeneous grammar […] their grammatical system can no longer be maintained to exhibit uniformity” (Li, 1986). In my opinion, one of the most obvious differences between Taiwanese and Peking Mandarin is the use of auxiliaries. Generally speaking, there is alarger number of regular auxiliaries used in Taiwanese than in Peking Mandarin. The auxiliaries in Taiwanese normally occur pre-verbally, but in Peking Mandarin they can also occur post-verbally. For example,4 Taiwanese u, “to have”, used as ahabitual or declarative auxiliary occurs pre-verbally; however, there is no such usage in Peking Mandarin. Another function of Taiwanese u, “to have”, is as an auxiliary for apast specific action, which also occurs pre-verbally; however, its counterpart in Peking Mandarin le always occurs post-verbally and is marked as PFV, i.e. perfective. In Taiwan, about eighty percent of the population speaks Taiwanese as their mother tongue, while Hakka accounts for 15% and the indigenous languages for about 2% among Taiwan’s population of 23 million. Because of the strict national language policy enforced in the 1940s, to this day almost the entire population in Taiwan speaks “Peking Mandarin”. Nevertheless, the “Peking Mandarin” variant as currently spoken in Taiwan, i.e. Taiwan Mandarin, has some notable differences in vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation compared to Standard Peking Mandarin. The differences are cultivated mostly due to the influence of the local languages in Taiwan, such as Taiwanese and Hakka. According to Cheng (1985), around seventy percent of lexical items in these two languages are shared, and most of these items or words are content words. However, the usages of these content words in these two languages are not exactly the same. For example, as mentioned in the previous paragraph, while the pre-verbal Taiwanese u, “to have”, is used as ahabitual or declarative auxiliary, there is no such usage in Peking Mandarin. See Example 1 below: 4 There are many other differences between Peking Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin. Nevertheless, this paper will only focus on the item you in these two varieties. OPEN ACCESS MELISSA SHIH-HUI LIN 89 1. Translation: “Do you eat beef?” (Lin, 2002). 1a. Taiwanese: Li u chian gu-ban bo? you U eat beef QM5 1b. Peking Mandarin: Ni chi niu-rou ma? you eat beef QM 1c. Taiwan Mandarin: Ni you chi niu-rou? you YOU eat beef In Example 1a, the Taiwanese u, “to have”, is used as ahabitual auxiliary to indicate the habit of eating beef; however, in Peking Mandarin there is no such usage, as shown in Example 1b. Interestingly, in Taiwan Mandarin, shown in Example 1c, the habitual auxiliary you, “to have”, is used. Chao (1968) mentions that the use of the structural pattern “have + VERB” occurs only in Cantonese and Min within the Chinese language family. However, due to along period of language contact, this pattern also exists in current Taiwan Mandarin. Generally speaking, you has the semantic meaning of “to have” and “to exist”, as presented in the following Examples 2 and 3 (Huang, 1987; Her, 1991). 2. Wo you hen duo shu (Her, 1991). IYOU very many book “Ihave many books.” 3. Zuo-shang you hen duo shu (Her, 1991). desk-top YOU very many book “There are many books on the desk.” In Example 2, you has the semantic meaning of “to have”, recognized as possession. You in Example 3 has the semantic meaning of “to exist” within the expression of existence, where its subject has to be alocative expression. There are many references relating to the two above mentioned general usages of you, including Chao (1968), Lu (1980), Zhan (1981), Huang (1987; 1988), Her (1991), Wei (1995), Lin (1999) and Cheng (2004). According to Lu (1980), the usages of you as averb can be classified into three types: (1) possessive, which sometimes occurs with zhe, as in the sentence like Ta you zhe yi fu hao ge hou “He/she has agood voice”, (2) existence, (3) quality or quantity. Syntactically, Huang (1987; 1988) further indicated that you can either be used in possessive sentences, existential sentences or it can have aperfective meaning. The last type mostly occurs in negative sentences or yes-no questions. Huang also points out that you used in the existential and perfective sentences should be classified as an auxiliary. There is another classification of you presented by Her (1991). According to Her (1991, p.381), when used as averb, you can be recognized as possessive, existential and (subjectless) locational. To demonstrate its usage as asubjectless locational verb, he proposed the Example shown below. 5 Question marker. OPEN ACCESS 90 STUDIE ZAPLIKOVANÉ LINGVISTIKY 1/2017 4. Zai zuo-shang you hen duo shu (Her, 1991). at desk-top YOU very many book “On the desk there are many books.” In Example 4, you is preceded by alocational preposition phrase and there is no noun phrase subject, and therefore Her labels this instance of you asubjectless locational verb. Although the meanings of Examples 3 and 4 appear to be quite similar, they follow two different sentence patterns. The subject of Example 3 has alocative expression, while Example 4 is asubjectless sentence. Her further proposed one additional usage of you, i.e. its usage as an idiomatic expression, such as you qian, “being rich”, as shown in the following example. 5. Ta hen you qian (Her, 1991). he/she very YOU money “He/she is very rich.” In Example 5, you qian must be used together. Without you, *Ta hen qian or without qian, *Ta hen you6 the sentence would be ungrammatical. However, this idiomatic usage of you is quite limited and only co-occurs with some specific items, i.e. you ming “famous”, you cai “talented” and so on. As aresult, some scholars in fact believe that these idiomatic expressions should be classified as adjectives. Currently, an increasing number of research concerning you, including Cheng (1981), Tsao and Cheng (1995), Tsai (2002; 2004) and Cheng (2001), is drawing attention to the fact that the usage of you in Taiwan Mandarin is one of characteristics based on which it can be differentiated from Peking Mandarin, as mentioned at the beginning of this section. You in Taiwan Mandarin is described as ahabitual or declarative auxiliary, and sometimes as an auxiliary for past specific action or having aperfective expression (Cheng, 1981; Tsao — Cheng, 1995; Tsai, 2004). Liu (2011), which further indicates that you can also be described as arealis marker, as shown in the following example. 6. Ta you lai (Tsai, 2004). 3SG YOU come “He/she has come.” The function of arealis marker shown in Example 6 is also described as an auxiliary for past specific action or it is described as aperfective expression in other scholars’ analysis. Liu only attempts to emphasize its function of realization. Nevertheless, the usage of you in Example 6 is considered ungrammatical in Peking Mandarin, but is considered to be one of the characteristics of Taiwan Mandarin. Another difference between Taiwan Mandarin and Peking Mandarin in the usage of you is when it is used in any context as ahabitual or declarative auxiliary respectively, as shown in 6 The symbol * in this paper refers to ungrammatical sentences, and ? means doubtable sentences. OPEN ACCESS MELISSA SHIH-HUI LIN 91 Examples 1b and 1c above. Furthermore, when you occurs in anegative form, shown in Example 7, it is not only used as adeclarative auxiliary, but it also has the function of an emphasis marker. 7. Wo xiao-shi-hou mei you hen tiao-pi (Tsai, 2004). Ichildhood NEG YOU very naughty “Iwas not very naughty when Iwas little.” In Example 7, you occurs with mei, the negation, to emphasis the declaration “not very naughty”. This function of you does not occur in Peking Mandarin, but does in Taiwan Mandarin. In Peking Mandarin, mei you rather tends to occur in acomparative sentence, shown in Example 8. 8. Wo didi mei you wo gao (Liu et al., 2011). 1SG brother NEG YOU 1SG tall “My younger brother is not as tall as Iam.” [Iam taller than my brother.] In Example 8, mei you is used to make acomparison, to say that one thing is of alesser degree than another (Liu et al., 2011), ausage which also occurs in Taiwan Mandarin. The language data in this paper was collected from Taiwanese students who were recorded in the NCCU foreign learner corpus. According to the background data, their native language is Taiwan Mandarin. Therefore we may conclude that the Taiwan Mandarin you in this paper has five usages: possession, existence, perfective or past specific action, habitual or declarative auxiliary and idiomatic expression. III. MÍT IN CZECH There are many sources focusing on the Czech word mít, including Daneš (1987), Karlík, Nekula and Rusínová (1995; 1996), Čechová (2000) etc. According to Cvrček (2010, p. 271), the usages of mít are recognized as modal, auxiliary and possessive, which are presented in the following examples. Firstly, Czech mít is used as averb expressing possession, as shown in the following example. Here, mám is the first person singular form of the Czech word mít in its present tense, expressing the semantic meaning of possession. 9. Mám knihu. MÍT book “Ihave abook.” Secondly, the Czech word mít can be used as an auxiliary. In Example 10, má is athird person singular form of the Czech word mít in the present tense. According to Cvrček (2010), it is used as an auxiliary in this example. OPEN ACCESS 92 STUDIE ZAPLIKOVANÉ LINGVISTIKY 1/2017 10. Má uvaříno (Cvrček, 2010). MÍT cooked “He finished cooking.” [It is cooked.] In relation to Example 10, it is necessary to take into account the opinion of Hausenblas (1963), who points out that such apattern is used to express a“state of result”, relating to the result of the preceding process. Following with Isačenko (1960), Hausenblas considers that patterns such as mám uklizeno “Ihave finished cleaning” [It is cleaned] or smlouvu už máme podepsánu “We have signed the contract” [The contract is signed] are classified into the grammatical cateogory “result of state”, which is different from the perfective aspect. Thirdly, the Czech word mít can sometimes be used as amodal verb when it co-occurs with infinite verbs, as shown in Example 11. In Example 11, měl is the third person masculine singular form of the Czech verb mít in the past tense, used as amodal to express the meaning of “should”. 11. Měl přijít (Cvrček, 2010). MÍT come “He should have come.” According to Clancy (2010), new modal verbs developed in Czech similarly to uses of the verb “to have”. In Czech, using the verb “to have” has asimilar meaning to “have to”. Additionally, the Czech word for “to have”, when being used in the past or conditional tenses, means “should”. The modal uses of “to have” may be motivated by the notions of obligation and responsibility entailed in possession. Apart from the above mentioned three usages of the Czech verb mít, Karlík, Nekula and Rusínová(1995; 1996) further point out that there is one more recognized usage of the Czech verb mít, that is, when it appears as an idiomatic expression, as shown in Example 12. In Example 12, mám is the first person sigular form of the Czech verb mít in the present tense. When Czech mít occurs with the adverb rád, together they express the meaning of “to like”. 12. Mám rád něco (Karlík — Nekula — Rusínová, 1995; 1996). MÍT like something “Ilike something.” Furthermore, the Czech verb mít in some specific contexts can be interpreted as expressing existence, according to Svozilová, Prouzová and Jirsová (1997), shown in the following Examples 13 and 14. 13. Máme Vánoce. MÍT Christmas “We have Christmas. / It is Christmas.” OPEN ACCESS MELISSA SHIH-HUI LIN 93 14. Kolik máte hodin? [how many] MÍT hour “What time is it? (according to your watch).” In conclusion it can be said that the Czech mít can be recognized as apossessive verb, an auxiliary, amodality marker, and in some specific contexts expresses existence. When it co-occurs with the adverb rád, they form an idiomatic expression. In the following section it is presented how Taiwanese students use the Czech mít in our corpus. IV. DISCUSSIONS OF THE LANGUAGE DATA FROM THE NCCU FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNER CORPUS With the support of the Ministry of Education in Taiwan and National Chengchi University, the Czech language became the eighth foreign language to appear in the NCCU foreign language learner corpus in the spring of 2015. One of the main reasons for introducing the Czech language to the NCCU corpus was the strong development of the Czech Study Program at the NCCU, which began in 2007. On average there are more than 50 students participating in this study program per academic year. The way in which these Taiwanese students understand and learn Czech provided essential data for building the Czech component within the structure of this corpus. At this point there are more than 300 texts in the NCCU Czech language learner corpus. This paper serves as an attempt to tackle the interesting phenomena of how Taiwanese students use the Czech language they learned and what might be implied by these usages. This section separates three groups of different usages of the Czech verb mít by these Taiwanese students, based on the language data collected in the corpus. As observed, their usages of Czech mít can be divided into the following three main categories: A) possessive meaning, B) meaning of existence and C) auxiliary. Some of the usages are correct, whilst some are not. In order to provide aclearer interpretation of these language data, and especially the data documenting incorrect usage, control examples performed by Czech native speakers are also presented below. A. TAIWANESE STUDENTS USE cZEcH MÍT TO EXPrESS POSSESSIVE MEANING According to the language data, Taiwanese students experience no confusion when using the Czech verb mít to express possessive meaning, as shown in the following example. 15. Mám hodně knih. MÍT many book “Ihave many books.” OPEN ACCESS 94 STUDIE ZAPLIKOVANÉ LINGVISTIKY 1/2017 However, the language data also demonstrate that Taiwanese students often use the Czech verb být “to be” to express possessive meaning, instead of mít, as shown in the following Examples 16a and 17a. *16a. Kolik dní jsou měsíc? how many day BÝT month “How many days are there in one month?” 16b. Kolik dní má měsíc? how many day MÍT month “How many days are there in one month?” *17a. Můj bratr často je úsměv na tváři. my brother often BÝT with smile on face “There is often smile on my brother’s face.” 17b. Můj bratr často má úsměv na tváři. my brother often MÍT with smile on face “There is often smile on my brother’s face.” Examples 16a and 17a are excerpted from the corpus and Examples 16b and 17b were produced by the control group composed of native speakers of Czech. Examples 16a and 17a seem to imply that Taiwanese students tend to project their knowledge of the word shi “to be”, which has possessive meaning, onto their learning of Czech. Such cases of projection will be further discussed in the next section of this paper. B. TAIWANESE STUDENTS USED cZEcH MÍT EXPrESSING EXISTENcE These Taiwanese students often use Czech mít to express the meaning of “to exist”, however this usage is not normally acceptable in Czech; as it can be applied only in certain contexts. Iassume that this incorrect usage of Czech mít is caused by the interference of their knowledge of you in Taiwan Mandarin, because you in Taiwan Mandarin has the semantic meaning of existence. See the following examples. ?18a. Tady má dobré počasí? Ne, nemá. here MÍT good climate no NEGMÍT “Is here agood weather? No, it isn’t.” 18b. Je tady dobré počasí? Ne, Není . BÝT here good climate no NEGBÝT “Is here good weather? No, it isn’t.” ?19a. Nemá problém. Udělám všechno. NEGMÍT problem do all “No problem. Iwill finish all.” OPEN ACCESS