Working without Syntax Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Chinese language..docVIP

Working without Syntax: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Chinese language Jianqi Wang Department of East Asian Languages; Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA, wang.551@ Submitted on 3 March 2004; Revised and Accepted on 21 March 2005 Abstract: This paper argues that mainstream Chinese syntactic perspective may be irrelevant to the practicum of Chinese. It attempts to inquire why Chinese language theorists, having written much on lexicology and phonology, did not develop any syntactic theory while there were constant contemporary demands on a unified and standardized structure of Chinese language in the history of ancient China. In the light of regional structural differences in the Chinese language; no historical record indicates that Chinese rulers or scholars proposed any unification of Chinese language structure in the first two thousand years of recorded history of China. Word order and the structural patterns of the Chinese language expressions were ignored by Chinese scholars for most part of the scholastic reflection on the Chinese language. By analyzing the Chinese perspectives on philosophy, logic, art and literature, this paper interprets a long-existing argument that Chinese remains close to its “original state” in a different way. It suggests that bounding of Chinese constraints comes mostly from the meaning of words rather than from the form of the words or word sequence. Meaning-governing and formal constraints are different restrictions that appeal to different cognitive mechanisms. Meaning (semantic?) constraint is conceptual image-oriented while formalistic (syntactic?) constraint is formal logic-oriented. As a language with larger range of syntactic tolerance and semantic involvement in machine translation, Chinese can be characterized as conceptual image-oriented. Keywords: Syntactic constraints, word order, semantic constraints, Chinese syntax