Positioning of Chinese time nouns and adverbs: Evidence from corpus, acceptability, and processing studies

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Mandarin Chinese lacks overt tense morphology, making temporal expression syntax crucial.
• Understanding temporal reference in tenseless languages requires examining syntactic placement and cognitive processing.
• Investigating time nouns and time adverbs reveals insights into Chinese grammar and human sentence processing.

Purpose of the Study:

• To analyze the syntactic placement of time nouns and time adverbs in Mandarin Chinese.
• To assess native speakers' acceptability judgments of temporal expressions in various sentence positions.
• To examine the cognitive processing and real-time comprehension of these temporal structures.

Main Methods:

• Corpus analysis of the BLCU Chinese Corpus to identify distributional patterns.
• Native speaker acceptability judgments on sentences with varied temporal expression placements.
• Psycholinguistic experiments measuring reaction time and accuracy during sentence comprehension.

Main Results:

• Time nouns exhibit flexible pre- or post-subject placement, while time adverbs predominantly appear post-subject.
• Post-subject time nouns are more acceptable; pre-subject placement is mainly for topicalization.
• Time adverbs strongly prefer post-subject positions; non-canonical placements lead to increased processing costs.

Conclusions:

• The human sentence processor is sensitive to structural preferences for temporal expressions.
• Canonical word orders for temporal expressions facilitate faster and more accurate processing.
• Findings offer a comprehensive account of temporal expression positioning and processing in Mandarin Chinese.