Wen-Yu Chiang | National Taiwan University (original) (raw)

Papers by Wen-Yu Chiang

Lingua, 1990

Abstract Chinese is presumed to lack wh-movement at S-structure (Huang (1982, 1984a)), yet wh-phr... more Abstract Chinese is presumed to lack wh-movement at S-structure (Huang (1982, 1984a)), yet wh-phrases do appear in preclausal position in natural discourse. To deal with this phenomenon, Xu and Langendoen (1985) regard such wh-phrases as base-generated ...

Oceanic Linguistics, 2009

Postlexical prosodic phenomena in Austronesian languages have received relatively little attentio... more Postlexical prosodic phenomena in Austronesian languages have received relatively little attention, and consequently their patterns remain unknown. This paper aims to bridge this gap by investigating how syntactic structure interacts with postlexical prosodic phenomena in Saisiyat, an endangered language spoken in Taiwan. Several significant findings are made. First, Saisiyat sentential fundamental frequency (F0) patterns are based largely on its original lexical-level word F0 contour. The accent of a content word in sentences usually falls on its ultimate syllable, while trisyllabic or quadrisyllabic content words may sometimes undergo postlexical accentual modifications such as accent spreading, accent fronting, and accent adding. Function words, in contrast, play a role of interpolation as an intermediate site in bridging the F0 of their preceding and following syllables. Second, a yes-no question exhibits substantial prosodic modification by influencing its word preceding sentence-final interrogative particle aj, as compared with its counterpart in a declarative sentence. Third, agents in agent-focus sentences and patients in patient-focus sentences demonstrate higher values with respect to F0 peak, mean F0, and mean intensity. We provide typological explanations for these findings and explore the theoretical implications of postlexical prosodic patterns of Formosan languages in Taiwan. 2. Among the few acoustic studies of prosody in the Austronesian languages of Taiwan is Chiang, Chang-Liao, and Chiang (2006), which investigated the prosodic realization of negation in Saisiyat, comparing the prosodic properties of its affirmative and negative sentences with those of British English. 3. In Saisiyat, the interrogative particle aj can appear in different positions in a sentence, such as after the noun or verb in the medial part of a sentence. However, the presence of a nonfinal aj usually accompanies a pragmatic emphasis that highlights the argument or phrase immediately before it. Moreover, the nonfinal aj does not represent a canonical usage in yes-no questions according to our two informants. As a result, only the usual final aj was included in our designed interrogative sentences. The yes-no questions discussed hereafter will not include any other connotations that express extra pragmatic or emotional purpose. 4. Abbreviations other than those used in the Leipzig Glossing rules are AF, actor focus;.LF, locative focus; PF, patient focus; RF, referential focus. All data are from our fieldwork except where indicated. (6) AGENT-FOCUS Minkoriŋan ma-ŋowip ʔilaʔ ka korkoriŋ. woman AF-forget PFV ACC child 'The woman forgot the child.' (7) PATIENT-FOCUS Rajhil karmaʔ-ən noka korkoriŋ. money steal-PF GEN child 'The money is stolen by the child.' (8) LOCATIVE-FOCUS (Yeh 2000) Ka-patol-an hini. KA-sing-LF here 'Here is the place for singing.' (9) INSTRUMENTAL/BENEFACTIVE-FOCUS (Yeh 2000) Kahoey si-sebet ni βakiʔ ka korkoriŋ. branch RF-beat GEN grandpa ACC child 'The branch is used by Grandpa to beat the child.' In (6), an AF marker ma-is attached to the verb, which means the subject minkoriŋan 'woman' is assigned the role of agent, who performs the action ŋowip 'to forget'. In (7), the subject rajhil 'money' is given a patient role by adding the suffix-ən to the verb, while the noun korkoriŋ 'child' is the agent of the verb karmaʔ 'steal'. Locative-focus in (8) is marked by the suffix-an; this kind of focus can only occur in equational sentences. Finally, (9) demonstrates one of many thematic meanings in RF sentences, in which the subject kahoey 'branch' serves as the instrument. Among the four types of focus, agentfocus and patient-focus are the most common, while the other two focus types are less frequent and more restricted in use. For this reason, our experimental data include agentfocus (AF) and patient-focus (PF) sentences only. 2.3 PREVIOUS STUDY OF INTONATIONAL PHONOLOGY IN SAISIYAT. Among the rare research on Saisiyat's intonational phonology, Chiang and Tung (2004) studied the relationship between the pitch height and the IU (intonational unit) boundary. 12 We use their findings as basic illustrations of intonational phonology in Saisiyat. By perceptual and acoustic examination, they found two fundamental accentual patterns marked as H*+L and H*, in which H stands for a high tone 13 carrying the accent * and L stands for a following low tone, using Pierrehumbert's (1980) representation of pitch contour within the autosegmental model. The representation of H*+L thus indicates a high falling pitch contour while that of H* shows a high-level pitch contour. In all IUs they examined, the accented ultimate syllables of content words are realized either as H*+L (47%) or H* (41%), with the remaining accented syllables bearing L* tones (12%). Some of their data are shown in example (10), 14 in which the last syllable of IU4-jaeh is realized as H*, and the last syllable in IU 7-kəm is realized as H*+L.

Oceanic Linguistics, 2006

Cross-linguistically, negation may be realized by means of syntactic marking, prosodic marking or... more Cross-linguistically, negation may be realized by means of syntactic marking, prosodic marking or a combination of the two, depending on the prosodic characteristics of the language in question. Syntactically, a language can use a single negator to express negation; such as not in English, or use various negators for different syntactic structures, such as those in Austronesian languages of Taiwan. Negation can also be marked prosodically. For example, Yaeger-Dror (2002) found that the Fo (fundamental frequency) of English /lot and French pas are higher than surrounding words. The current literature suggests that such prosodic differences accompanying the syntactic marking of negation are relatively common; the use of only prosodic marking to realize negation, in contrast, is relatively rare. The question of whether a negator is invariably acoustically more prominent than its surrounding words, however, remains unresolved. Semantically, negators bring new information to a sentence; for this reason, they assume 'focal prominence'. Yaeger-Dror (2002) proposes the 'Cognitive Prominence Principle', according to which cognitively prominent items, such as negators, should be prosodically marked. According to this principle, acoustic prominence enhances discourse participants' attention to focused items, which maximizes the effectiveness of communication. Acoustic evidence for the 'Cognitive Prominence Principle' was found in Allen (1973). In this study, participants were required to utter a set of negative sentences. Measurement of fO values within those sentences determined that the pitch of negators was usually higher than that of contiguous lexical items. According to Yager-Dror (1985, 2002), the unstable behavior of negators stems from the conflict between the 'Cognitive Prominence Principle' and what they have termed the 'Social Agreement Principle'. On the one hand, a negator, due to its sentential prominence, must be prosodically marked in order to comply with the Cognitive Prominence Principle. On the other hand, the Social Agreement Principle discourages emphasis on any objection to a conversation partner's previous assertion, which would effectively eliminate any prosodic prominence assigned to negators. Yager-Dror's research suggests that the choice to assign prosodic prominence to negators may be sensitive to the dynamics of culture and discourse. Whether the prosodic prominence on negators found in English negative sentences can be found across a range of language types has yet to be explored. The current study focuses on the prosodic realization of negators in Saisiyat 1 , an endangered aboriginal language of Taiwan, and compares its prosodic realization of negation with that of English. The results of this study indicate that sentential subjects are the most acoustically prominent items in the Saisiyat negative sentences measured. This contrasts sharply with the English experimental sentences, in which the negator itself was the most acoustically prominent item. These findings suggest that Saisiyat is a pitch-accent language; thus, the presence of negators does not significantly change the prosodic

Oceanic Linguistics, 2005

This paper investigates the acoustic realization of lexical-level accent in Saisiyat, an endanger... more This paper investigates the acoustic realization of lexical-level accent in Saisiyat, an endangered aboriginal language of Taiwan. Accent in Saisiyat usually falls on the ultimate syllable of content words. This phenomenon has been described in previous studies as either "stress" or "accent." Our measurements and analysis of various prosodic parameters of syllable rhyme (F0 height at onset, offset, peak, and valley, as well as pitch range, duration, slope, peak alignment, and intensity peak) suggest that accent in Saisiyat should be classi²ed as pitch accent, because lexical accent is realized by means of speci²c F0 patterns, rather than duration and intensity. Thus, among three typological categories that have been proposed for languages (lexical tone, lexical stress, and lexical pitch accent), we propose that Saisiyat belongs to the category that has lexical pitch accent.

Discourse & Society, 2007

By analyzing naming strategies and conceptual metaphors for SARS in three major broadsheet newspa... more By analyzing naming strategies and conceptual metaphors for SARS in three major broadsheet newspapers, The Liberty Times and The United Daily News in Taiwan, and The People's Daily in China, this article demonstrates how the political agendas and underlying ideologies of newspapers permeate their use of metaphors. Taking critical metaphor analysis (Charteris-Black, 2004) as the theoretical framework, we analyze how the DISEASE IS WAR metaphor, in particular, constructs Self and Other, as well as several other metaphors (e.g. DISEASE IS A NATURAL DISASTER/ A DISASTER IN GENERAL). We argue that all the linguistic devices under consideration represent SARS as an issue in the domain of political rather than medical discourse.

Metaphor and Symbol, 2007

This paper attempts to delineate the intersection of the Buddhist understanding of mind and cogni... more This paper attempts to delineate the intersection of the Buddhist understanding of mind and cognitive linguistics by exploring conceptual metaphors at both micro and macro levels of the Heart Sutra, a pivotal Buddhist text. Taking a key Buddhist concept, EMPTINESS, to mean transcending the self, Buddhism may be misunderstood as promoting a view of the human mind as disembodied. Micro-level linguistic analysis, however, reveals a paradox between the central message of non-attachment to the body or to the sensations and the pervasiveness of lexical metaphors in the text involving sensori-motor experiences. Investigations of the overarching metaphors and oxymora at the macro-level, such as "FORM IS EMPTY" and "EMPTINESS IS FORM" suggest that Buddhism in fact bears some striking similarities to cognitive philosophy in its recognition of embodiment and categorization as key aspects of mind, whose figurative nature becomes comprehensible through EMPTINESS as a reflection of the dependent nature of all phenomena. Cognitive linguistics has received considerable attention as an interdisciplinary field producing abundant research in recent years. With the cognitivist approach characteristic of major philosophies around the globe, the ideas of Buddhism are

ZAS Papers in Linguistics

This study investigates the dispersion of vowel space in Truku, an endangered Austronesian langua... more This study investigates the dispersion of vowel space in Truku, an endangered Austronesian language in Taiwan. Adaptive Dispersion (Liljencrants and Lindblom, 1972; Lindblom, 1986, 1990) proposes that the distinctive sounds of a language tend to be positioned in phonetic space in a way that maximizes perceptual contrast. For example, languages with large vowel inventories tend to expand the overall acoustic vowel space. Adaptive Dispersion predicts that the distance between the point vowels will increase with the size of a language's vowel inventory. Thus, the available acoustic vowel space is utilized in a way that maintains maximal auditory contrast.

Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 2004

The relationship between gender and discourse has been the focus of a substantial body of researc... more The relationship between gender and discourse has been the focus of a substantial body of research over the past decade. Theories of gender discourse are generally based on one of three models: (a) the dominance model, (b) the difference model, or (c) the postmodern paradigm. This study applies those three models to data found in 189 conversations collected from BBS sites in Taiwan. Specifically, this paper investigates the effect of gender configuration (single- vs. cross-gender) and topic orientation (informational vs. emotional) on the use of four particular strategies in Mandarin BBS discourse: use of sentence-final particles (p), intensifiers (i), code switching (c), and emoticons (e), which together form the acronym PICE. Our data show significant relationships between: (a) gender configuration and the use of utterance-final particles, intensifiers, and emoticons of embarrassment; (b) topic orientation and the use of happiness emoticons. The data also demonstrate effects of ge...

Abbreviation of forms which have already been understood, or which can be expected to be understo... more Abbreviation of forms which have already been understood, or which can be expected to be understood, is probably a language universal, owing to the economic motivation of linguistic formation. In Taiwan Mandarin, we find a phenomenon of word abbreviation that ”usually takes the form of a selection of a few key morphemes from a long string of morphemes” (Chao, 1968: 492), e.g., huanjing baohu → huanbao 'environmental protection'. Abbreviation is particularly interesting from the theoretical angle of how ”key morphemes” are selected. To investigate the issue of why one morpheme is favored over another in the abbreviation process in Taiwan Mandarin, an experiment was designed to determine the main constraint in selection of key morphemes. Two grammatical constraints, one morphological and one semantic, are proposed and shown to compete in constraining the selection of the morphemes. The morphological constraint states that the selected morpheme in Abbreviation is the leftmost e...

Within the theoretical and methodological framework based on the conceptual metaphor theory, the ... more Within the theoretical and methodological framework based on the conceptual metaphor theory, the discourse-historical approach, and corpus linguistics, this article examines the various representations of Taiwan indigenous people's name rectification movement in three major broadsheet newspapers, the United Daily News, the Liberty Times, and the Apple Daily in Taiwan. Using two-tier analysis, which incorporates the discourse-historical approach into the conceptual metaphor theory, we demonstrate that JOURNEY and CONFLICT metaphors, the two predominant types identified in news coverage, are portrayed in divergent ways in different news media. By analyzing the cognitive characteristics of conceptual metaphors in combination with other discursive/rhetorical strategies, we demonstrate that political orientations and underlying ideologies are ingrained in the corpora news reports, and the ways in which the newspapers' publishers delineate the indigenous issue echo the different p...

Concentric： Studies in Linguistics, 2007

This paper uses Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black 2004), and Grammatical Metaphor Analy... more This paper uses Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black 2004), and Grammatical Metaphor Analysis (Halliday 1985) to analyze the conceptual and grammatical metaphors of STATE appearing in the Constitutions of the Republic of China (Taiwan) and the United States. We demonstrate that metaphors related to STATE in the R.O.C. Constitution mostly represent the state as PROTECTOR, ESTABLISHER and AWARDER, whereas the U.S. Constitution casts the state in the role of POSSESSOR or HOLDER. As for grammatical metaphors, the lexeme state in the R.O.C. Constitution tends to occur as an agent subject in active sentences. In the U.S. Constitution, in contrast, the lexeme state most often occurs in passive sentences, in a role other than that of agent, usually as part of a modifying prepositional phrase. We propose that differences in the types of metaphors used in these two texts reflect differences in the framers' intent, as well as differences in the two societies' characterization of...

This study investigates "critically" how metaphors are used to present a particular message or id... more This study investigates "critically" how metaphors are used to present a particular message or ideology by analyzing newspaper discourse. The framework, Critical Metaphor Model (CMM) is adopted in this study. CMM is a modified approach which incorporates the central tenets of Conceptual

Visual Communication

This study investigates how music is represented in musical-themed manga by visual components ref... more This study investigates how music is represented in musical-themed manga by visual components referred to as ‘visualized music’, and how embodied mechanisms of musical experience conceive these visual manifestations. Using Šorm and Steen’s (2018) Visual Metaphor Identification Procedure (VISMIP), the authors discovered four metaphors, and seven metonymies and ‘manpu’ (i.e. iconic signs used in manga) that are widely applied in visualizing music. In addition, they incorporated Juslin and Västfjäll’s (2008) framework and further proposed five major embodied mechanisms of musical experience: (1) brain stem reflex, (2) emotional contagion, (3) visual imagery, (4) emotional memory related to music, and (5) musical expectancy. Their results showed that these embodied mechanisms are the foundations of visualized music. The brain stem reflex, the underlying structure of most metonymies and manpu, triggers us to represent some acoustic characteristics by using sound symbolic components. Thes...

Metaphor and the Social World

This study analyzes five political cartoons published in the Taiwan Nichinichi Shinpo (Taiwan Dai... more This study analyzes five political cartoons published in the Taiwan Nichinichi Shinpo (Taiwan Daily Newspaper) depicting the Musha Uprising, an indigenous rebellion against Japanese colonial rule that occurred in Taiwan in 1930. The study has produced two important findings and theoretical implications. First, two of the political cartoons deployed The Great Chain of Being multimodal metaphor, and the artist’s conceptual blending of Japanese kabuki stories with the Musha Uprising dramatically portrayed the colonizers as humans and the colonized as animals. We analyze the social and historical context to explain why these cartoons used the boar as a metaphor representing the indigenous people. Second, our results reveal paradoxical and ambivalent perspectives in the cartoons. On one hand, the metaphor of Human vs. Animal reproduced the unequal hierarchical relations between the colonizers and the colonized. On the other hand, the cartoonist also portrayed the rulers in a critical and...

Cognitive Linguistic Studies

Compared to metaphors about God in the Bible, those in other Christian contexts seem to receive l... more Compared to metaphors about God in the Bible, those in other Christian contexts seem to receive little academic attention. To bridge this gap, this study examines metaphors gathered from gospel songs on Billboard and iTunes to analyze the abstract concept of God from a cognitive linguistic viewpoint through extending the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory. Our findings indicate that while diverse kinds of metaphors focus on the multi-dimensionality of God such as his characteristics (e.g.,GOD IS A MAGICIANandGOD IS A LOVER), outline (e.g.,GOD IS A CONTAINERandGOD IS LIQUID), and supreme status (e.g.,GOD IS HIGH), structural metaphors tend to represent the overwhelming majority and thus form the basis for the structural-metaphor-dominant phenomenon. In addition, the flawless figure of God is suggested to result from thePERFECTIONimage schema which is responsible for hidden aspects in related metaphorical structures. Furthermore, metaphors about divine images, having their mappin...