Recently, Professor Zhou Ren of the Department of Chinese of Peking University published "Syllables in the Study of Chinese Prosody grammar – Semantic Vision" published at the Commercial Press and was selected as one of the Top Ten Good Books of the Commercial Press in February 2022. This book is a very meticulous and well-analyzed examination of the phenomenon of prosody and syntax in Chinese, and puts forward many creative ideas, of which the test method is the highlight of this book. In addition, the book is also quite brilliant in terms of logical reasoning and proof.
The preface to this issue is dedicated to the readers.
sequence
Dr. Zhou Ren's monograph "Syllables in the Study of Chinese Prosody grammar – Semantic Perspectives" is completed and will be published by the Commercial Press. I am very happy to preface this book.
Zhou Ren entered the Department of Chinese of Peking University in 2003 and studied for a doctorate under my guidance. At that time, he and I agreed to make the study of prosody grammar the topic of our doctoral dissertation. After the direction of the topic was determined, everything went smoothly. In 2006, his doctoral dissertation "Research on the Interactive Relationship between Modern Chinese Prosody and Grammar" successfully passed the defense, and after collation and revision, it was selected into the "Chinese Chinese Linguistics Library", which was published by the Commercial Press in 2011. Zhou Ren's doctoral dissertation has received good evaluation in the academic community. In 2008, Zhou Ren won the Young Linguist Award of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences for some of the chapters in the paper. After the paper was officially published, it also won important awards such as the "Beijing Philosophy and Social Science Outstanding Achievement Award" and the "Ministry of Education Higher Education Scientific Research Outstanding Achievement Award".
However, Zhou Ren did not stop moving forward. Since graduating, he has been thinking about the fundamental problems of prosody grammar and has continuously published new research papers on Chinese prosody grammar. Now, he has sorted out and connected the thinking of these ten years again, and presented it to everyone in the form of a monograph, hoping to be corrected by colleagues in the academic circles. As one of the earliest readers of this book manuscript, I would like to say a few personal insights about some of the features of this book manuscript:
First, re-understand the essence of Chinese prosody grammar
First, the book does a good job of re-understanding the essence of Chinese prosody grammar. Regarding the relationship between prosody and grammar, the author puts forward a clear theoretical view: prosody itself, like word order and virtual words, is also a means of expressing grammatical meaning in Chinese. The relationship between prosody and grammar is difficult to simply describe as an "interactive" relationship, and it is especially difficult to say that prosody has a strong restrictive effect on syntax. Between prosody and syntax, it is not a competitive relationship, but more of a synergistic relationship. Prosody and syntax are both designed to better express semantic pragmatic relationships, so they are a form and means of packaging in a language code. Obviously, this theoretical view is different from the previously popular "interaction" theory that looks at the constraint between prosody and grammar.
Regarding the representation of grammar-related prosody in Chinese, the author points out that Chinese shows an important feature of syllable counting in the phenomenon of prosody grammar. The number of syllables in the minds of native Chinese speakers has a simple, convenient, accurate and consistent judgment, compared to the vague, illegible Phenomenon of Chinese accents, the number of syllables can serve as a better coding form and decoding basis. In Chinese, the important pattern of "monosyllabic-monolingual-monole" determines that Chinese and Indo-European languages have very different grammatical operation procedures. This understanding and perspective undoubtedly has a solid linguistic factual basis and sufficient empirical evidence.
Second, the excavation of new materials and new phenomena
Second, the book does a good job of excavating new materials and new phenomena. Based on the understanding of the important role of syllable counts in Chinese grammar, the authors worked to identify some gaps in the study of Chinese prosody grammar. For example, previous research has focused more on the antagonistic relationship between single and double syllables, while the book discusses the antagonistic relationship between Chinese two-syllables and tetrasyllabic components. The author believes that in addition to the musical steps, there is also a rhythmic unit in Chinese, that is, a unit of rhythm based on four syllables. The distribution of this unit of prosody is described in detail, and combined with the study of the "semi-comma law" in the study of the new poetic grammar of the Chinese vernacular, the prosody factors of the distribution of the word "of" are discussed. The author argues that the tetrasyllabic component, as a first-level unit of prosody, cannot correspond to any ready-made unit of prosody in Western prosodystology, again showing that Chinese is a language with syllable counts. In the book, the author's mining and re-analysis of linguistic facts can be seen everywhere. For example, the discussion of structural prosody patterns in Chinese and the location of monosyllabic azimuth components in street naming, these new linguistic facts and unique analysis are refreshing and deepen our understanding of related issues.
Iii. On academic traditions and cutting-edge theories
Grasp and combine
Third, the book does a good job of grasping and combining academic traditions and cutting-edge theories. The author is very familiar with the classic treatises on Chinese grammar, and can be used by me and integrated into the research system of the entire manuscript. For example, for the understanding of Chinese accents, the author has re-sorted Out Mr. Zhao Yuanren's understanding in "Spoken Chinese Grammar". In the past, scholars paid much attention to Mr. Zhao's discussion that "the last syllable is the heaviest, followed by the first syllable, and the middle syllable is the lightest" in the Chinese multi-character group. But what Mr. Zhao actually means is that even in a group of words like "Shanhaiguan", the word "sea" with the lightest in the middle has a normal accent. Whether it is the heaviest, second or third, it has no linguistic significance, and is a variation of a phoneme. This re-understanding of the classics, not conforming to the crowd, has a very important significance for solving problems. Regarding the position of accents in the study of Chinese prosody and grammar, the author cites Mr. Zhu Dexi's understanding of the "materialization of names" in Chinese lexical classes, and believes that accents, like the materialization of names, have no empirical support in Mandarin Chinese, and add procedural cumbersomeness, so the settings of stress and objectification of names are unnecessary.
In terms of research methods, in the observation and comparison of linguistic facts, the author strictly follows the analytical method of structuralist linguistics, and widely uses the comparative means of "minimum pairing", so as to carefully analyze which grammatical effects are caused by syntactic factors and which are caused by semantic or pragmatic factors, and then clarify the role of prosody in it. At the same time, on the basis of fully grasping the relevant theories and research results of phonology, syntax, linguistic typology and cognitive linguistics at home and abroad, the book adopts a functionalist approach to semantic pragmatics, and uses important means of functional grammar such as iconicity and structural decomposition (parsing) to conduct in-depth analysis and interpretation of relevant Chinese prosodymatic grammatical phenomena, receives good results, and establishes its own unique theoretical model of "syllable-semantic pragmatics" correlation.
In short, I think that the book "Syllables of Chinese Prosody Grammar Research – Semantic Vision" is based on the ontological facts of Chinese, strives to get rid of the indo-European perspective of looking at Chinese, firmly grasps the basic pattern of "monosyllabic - monolingual - single word" in Chinese, breaks the dominance of musical steps and accent theory in the study of Chinese prosody grammar for many years, and establishes a research route of prosody grammar that fits the essence of Chinese. It can be said that the book establishes the research idea of Chinese prosody grammar with semantics and pragmatics as the main analysis angle, excavates the role of Chinese tetrasyllabic components in grammar, and fills in some gaps in the study of Chinese prosody grammar in the past. The conclusions of this study should be of some help not only to theoretical linguistics, but also to the prosody analysis of Chinese information processing, the teaching of prosody in the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language, and the construction of the corpus of spoken Chinese and the study of Chinese poetic law. The book's shortcomings are that not enough attention is paid to the colorful prosodic grammatical phenomena in Chinese dialect grammar. It is hoped that in the follow-up research, the authors can widely collect many grammatical phenomena related to prosody in chinese multi-dialects, make in-depth analysis, and extract appropriate theoretical principles from them.
is the prologue!
Yuan Yulin
January 15, 2020 in Oak Bay, Qinghe, Beijing
(Note: For the convenience of readers, the subtitles in this article are added by the editors of this issue.) ）
Book information
Syllables in the Study of Chinese Prosody grammar – Semantic Perspectives
Zhou Ren