Keywords: Lexicalization,; The Mental Lexicon; Morphology; Comparative Typology; Grammaticalization; Neurolinguistics; Lexical Retrieval

New Perspectives on Lexicalization and Opacity in Chinese, English and Hebrew

 

Lexical status in a language is considered to be synchronically fixed (Heine et al. 1991:95), but there is evidence from psycholinguistic experiments and observations that indicates there is more than one level of lexicality. In Chinese, the word for `word ' 字 zhi simultaneously refers to a character, a syllable, a morpheme, a lexeme, and also to a syntactic word.

  1. 我 們 走 路 去 學 校.

wo men zou lu chu sui xiao

1st pl walk road to study school

'We walk to school.'

字 zhi `word' can refer to the ideograph 路,to the sound lu4, to the morpheme meaning `road' or to the same morpheme serving as a less literal component in a compound such as 走 路, zou lu, `walk', and also to the compound itself. It does not matter whether a morpheme is free, such as 路 lu `road' or bound such as the 們 men `plural' . Each of these linguistic elements can be referred to as 字 zhi.

In psychological terms, however, there are distinctions between the sorts of phenomena which are associated with the different levels. Literacy plays an interesting role in discovering these different layers of lexicality. When asked to repeat sentence (1) backwards, more literate subjects were more likely to reverse the order of the morphemes as in (2a), while less literate subjects more often reversed the order of the syntactic words, whether simplex or compound, as in (2b).

(2)

  1. 校 學 去 路走 們 我

    2. xiao sui chu lu zou men wo

  2. 學校 去 走路 我 們

sui xiao chu zou lu wo men

Furthermore, less literate subjects were less likely to be able to give a meaning for the components of a compound than were more literate subjects. (Katz, MS). However, evidence from brain damaged patients suggests that there is a psychological reality to the lexical status of the component morphemes of a word. Those with Broca's aphasia often produce only the nominal element of a compound (e.g. the 路 of 路走) while those with Wernicke's aphasia are more likely to produce the verbal element of the compound (e.g. the 走 of 路走.)(Bates & Chen 1991, Zhang MS.) This implies that the grammatical category of the component is still present synchronically and available to a speaker, despite the overriding category of the compound as a whole.

Slips of the tongue in normal, but less literate subjects indicate the primacy of the compound as a psychological lexeme. When asked to read sentence (3), a majority of undereducated subjects pronounced the sequence 小兔子xiao tu zhi `small rabbit' as 小白兔 xiao bai tu `small white rabbit'. It seems that 小白兔 xiao bai tu has been lexicalized colloquially to stand for `rabbit', and in reading 小兔子xiao tu zhi rapidly the subjects accessed their semantic translation of the ideograph and then realized it in speech as their normal lexeme for the concept `rabbit'. In that case, the compound 小白兔 xiao bai tu has become an opaque lexeme, whose component morphemes are irrelevant to the meaning of the whole.

  1. 小 兔 子, 跳 跳 跳.

Xiao tu zhi tiao tiao tiao

small rabbit diminutive jump jump jump

'The small rabbit jumps.'

The above observations are the result of experimental research performed under Taiwan National Science Council Grant # 89-2411-H-126-020. Under that grant, the concepts of psychological versus circumstantial opacity were explored. As a follow-up to that study, the current project will assess effects of literacy and exposure to particular lexemes and their components in order to determine the psychological effects on lexical opacity from different degrees of literacy.

The experiment will involve subjects in Taiwan who are speakers of Mandarin, English and Hebrew. The effects of the different writing systems on the degree of opacity encountered will also be compared. The three languages belong to three different language families: Sinitic, Indo-European and Semitic, respectively. The typologies of the three languages are also quite distinct. In addition, the writing systems exploit the different functional loads which are carried by different elements in each language. Chinese characters represent a syllable and a morpheme simultaneously. Hebrew characters represent consonants only, largely ignoring vowels, since lexical morphemes in Hebrew consist of discontinuous triliteral roots. (Ephratt 1997). In English, where vowels carry a high functional load, there is a mixture of an old phonemic orthography, largely marred by subsequent historical changes that make pronunciation unpredictable.

The present study will track the correlates of literacy in the opacity or transparency of component morphemes in the three languages.