友善列印 - Spring 2011 Colloquium 6

Spring 2011 Colloquium 6

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國立清華大學語言所九十九學年度專題演講六** 
 
演講者: Hsin-I Hsieh (University of Hawaii) 
 
演講題目: Finite-verb and Temporal Sequence Emerge Differently from the Same Mind 
 
時間:2011.6.1(星期三) 中午12:30 
 
地點: 語言所研討室(人社院B305室) 
 
 
摘要 
This paper is concerned with the claim and its supporting evidence that in sentential processing, both the Finite Verb Frame, such as employed in English, and the Principle of Temporal Sequence (Tai 1985, 2002) such as utilized in Chinese emerge from the same mind but are geared toward different brain strategies. 
Experts (Sperry 1982, Gazaaniga2008) in neuroscience have convinced us that the right half and the left half of the brain function as two complementary components to process information in a unified way. The left hemisphere processes information linearly in a logical and mathematical manner,collecting parts into a whole, from which it deduces a conclusion. Its processing strategy is composition of parts into whole. Hence, the whole is the sum of the parts, as the left brain sees it. In contrast, the right hemisphere first forms the image of a whole, and then it decomposes the whole into parts, with some information in the whole not transferred to the parts. Hence, the whole is more than the sum of its parts, as the right brain views it. In the well-known Chinese metaphor about mutual enhancement illustrated with the image of a red peony embellished by its green leaves , the left side of the brain sees the ‘picture’ of the red peony and its embellishing green leaves, and in this picture the whole is the sum of the parts. But the right side of the brain sees the ‘image’ of a red peony embellished by its green leaves, without seeing the beauty fully percolated down to its parts. In other words, the whole is bigger than its parts. Sperry has suggested that the mind emerges from the brain, and Gazzaniga has further suggested that language emerges from the mind, and both of them think there is a bidirectional mutual feeding between what emerges from a system and the system itself. 
Jim Tai (1985) is the first to have pointed out that Chinese employs a Principle of Temporal Sequence (PTS) to structure words and phrases in a sentence, in a clear contrast to English,which utilizes a Finite Verb Frame (FVF) for the same purpose. Consider the following sentences: 
 
(1) 
a. Zhang1-san1(i) lai2 zher4(ii) zuo4 gong1gong4qi4che1. 
‘Zhansan (i) came here (ii) to take the bus.’ 
 
b. Zhang1-san1 (ii) zuo4 gong1gong4qi4che1 (i) lai2 zher4. 
‘Zhangsan (ii) took the bus to (i) come here.’ 
(2) 
a. John came here to take the bu. 
b. John took the bus to come here. 
 
Comparing the two pairs of sentences, (1) and (2), we see that PTS is employed in Chinese but FVF is utilized in English. Tai (1985, 2002) persists in suggesting that the PTS is a cognitive principle, distinct from a formal principle like FVF. This paper shifts the focus from Tai’s concern over the nature of grammatical rules to the issue of how grammatical rules emerge from the mind. It argues that PTS leans towards the left hemisphere’s sequential processing, whereby events are linearly sequenced, and FVS inclines towards the right hemisphere’s hierarchical arrangement, which puts the finite-verb as the most salient node on the top ofa hierarchical tree, and other-category words --such as the infinitives in (2.a) and (2.b)--as nodes of decreasing degrees in saliency in the multi-layered hierarchical tree.