Professor David C. S. LI

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong

Title: Assessing the Monosyllabic Salience Hypothesis (MSH) in Cantonese: Transference of monosyllabic English words (MEWs) into Cantonese, Japanese and Korean
 

Abstract

Li et al. (2015, 2016) found extensive support for a preference for monosyllabicity in Hong Kong Cantonese, a putative typological feature which is more marked for verbs and adjectives than nouns, the latter being subjected to a bisyllabic constraint (Luke & Lau 2008). Monosyllabicity appears to facilitate transference of monosyllabic English words (MEWs) into Cantonese. In a corpus of informal writing collected from Hong Kong Chinese newspaper columns (mid-1990s), roughly 1 in 4–5 unintegrated insertions (Muysken 2000) is monosyllabic. The Monosyllabic Salience Hypothesis (MSH) is supported by five lexico-syntactic features:

a. shorter average word length compared with Mandarin;

b. truncation of polysyllabic English words (PEWs) to monosyllables;

c. truncation of the first syllable of a PEW embedded in an A-not-A question;

d. exploitation of bilingual homophony for punning; and

e. coinage of Romanized ‘mono’ Cantonese words like chok and hea.

These findings support Clyne’s (2003) theory of facilitation – an extension of his earlier postulation of ‘triggering’ (Clyne 1967, 1980), which explains why transference of linguistic (phonological, lexical, syntactic, semantic, etc.) features tends to be facilitated if such features are shared in the languages within the polylingual’s repertoire.

As a typological feature, MSH cannot be ascertained without a methodical and systematic comparison with typologically different languages. Li et al. (2016:9) found that 262 MEW types (156 nouns, 66 verbs, 40 adjectives) are freely inserted into Hong Kong Written Chinese. To ascertain the typological uniqueness of MSH in Cantonese, there is a need to investigate the extent to which such 262 MEWs are also transferred – as unintegrated insertions or integrated borrowings or loanwords – into typologically unrelated languages such as Japanese or Korean. The contrastive method will be illustrated with the help of one or two examples from bilingual dictionaries. Implications for Clyne’s (2003) theoretical framework of ‘facilitation of transference’ will be discussed.

​

Keywords: Code-switching, translanguaging, borrowing, facilitation of transference, monosyllabicity

References cited

Clyne, Michael. (1967). Transference and triggering. The Hague: Nijhoff.

Clyne, Michael. (1980). Triggering and language processing. Canadian Journal of Psychology 34: 400–406.

Clyne, Michael. (2003). Dynamics of language contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

李楚成﹑梁慧敏﹑黃倩萍﹑黃得森  [Li, David C. S., Leung, W. M., Wong, Cathy S. P., & Wong, Sam T. S.] (2015). 香港粵語「單音節促發論」分析 ¾ 語言接觸下的新視角. 中國社會語言學 (The Journal of Chinese Sociolinguistics) 24(1): 96–108.

Li, David C. S., Wong, Cathy S. P., Leung, W. M., & Wong, Sam. T. S. (2016). Facilitation of transference: The case of monosyllabic salience in Hong Kong Cantonese. Linguistics 54(1): 1–58. http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/ling.2016.54.issue-1/ling-2015-0037/ling-2015-0037.xml

Luke, Kang-Kwong, & Chaak-Ming Lau. 2008. On loanword truncation in Cantonese.Journal of East Asian Linguistics 17(4). 347–362.

Muysken, Pieter. (2000). Bilingual speech: A typology of code-mixing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

​

Bio

David C. S. Li obtained his BA in English (Hong Kong), MA in Applied Linguistics (Besançon, France), and PhD in Linguistics (Cologne, Germany). Since his first academic appointment as Lecturer (1992), he has developed a keen interest in sociocultural aspects of language learning and use in multilingual settings. He has published in contrastive aspectology (tense and aspect), World Englishes, ‘Hongkong English’, ‘China English’, bilingual interaction and code-switching (translanguaging), bilingual education and language-in-education policy (兩文三語, ‘biliteracy and trilingualism’), multilingualism in Greater China, Chinese learners’ EFL learning difficulties and error-correction strategies, Cantonese as an additional language, and South Asian Hongkongers’ needs for written Chinese. He speaks Cantonese, English and Mandarin fluently, is conversant in German and French, and is learning Korean. He is the author of two recent monographs: Multilingual Hong Kong: Languages, Literacies and Identities (Springer, 1/2017), and Chinese-English Contrastive Grammar: An Introduction (with Zoe Luk, HKU Press, 8/2017).