The Word Order of Disyllabic Chinese Antonym Phrases in CFL Learning: An Application of "the Principle of Relative Tones"
Ping-Jung Chiang, Ruiming Zhong · 2010
Just as EFL learners have difficulty choosing between ”rich and famous” and ”famous and rich” as the correct English binomial for its Chinese equivalent ming2-li4 (famous-rich), so CFL (Chinese as a Foreign Language) learners have similar difficulty deciding whether the Chinese equivalent of ”friends and relatives” is qin1-you3 (relative-friend), or you3-qin1 (friend-relative). That the word ordering of English binomials is just in a reverse order of or in the same way as their Chinese equivalents is the question. In general, CFL learners employ three language-learning strategies to cope with translating fixed English binomials into disyllabic Chinese parallel phrases. Chiang and Zhong (2007) argue that none of the three strategies provides a reliable way to successfully decide the word ordering in the two languages. As a result, many CFL learners rely heavily on rote learning to do so. Though many alternatives, such as semantic, morphological, and/or syntactic approaches, have been proposed to account for the word ordering of disyllabic Chinese parallel phrases, we have tried to propose a mechanism based on phonological explanations. The mechanism-”the Principle of Relative Tones”-offers a feasible explanation of the word order of the two elements in fixed disyllabic Chinese antonym phrases.