荀學理論建基於道德之外在客觀性，與孔子之言心及孟子進一步發展之心性論所言之主體性、價值自覺相去甚遠，因此長久以來就因其性惡之說而備受非議，勞思光更稱之為「儒學之歧途」。然而，得指出荀學自其出發點發展開去，已成一套一致自足之理論，而其理論本身之內在價值，更是值得我們重視的。

Download (29.07 KB)

As the Kosovo Report has put it, ‘[a]ny assessment of conflict involving ethnic identity requires delicate treatment of language.1’ No doubt, language often plays an undeniable role in ethnic conflicts, which signifies its importance in defining one’s national, or that in a broader sense, ethnic identity. In this paper, we shall examine the links between these two.

Download (16.64 KB)

The connection between language and thought is profound. The majority of our everyday life involves the use of language. We tell our ideas to others with language, we “read” their responses and understand their meanings with language, and very often, we “speak” internally to ourselves when we process this information and make logical conclusions. It seems that rational thinking unavoidably involves certain degree of the use of language. This connection seems so tight that, some linguists like Sapir and Whorf had to propose that thought is indeed utterly determined by language.

On the other hand, some linguists hold that language and thought are two separate and independent entities. The differences in the syntactic structure and the lexicons available in different languages, for example, cannot possibly determine the way these people think. Thus we have thought in the very first place, and then language came in as a tool for expressing our thought.

Still some others, not feeling contented with either version, proposed a third possibility, that language and thought are interdependent. “Language is a regular part of the process of thinking… It is not a question of one notion taking precedence over the other, but of both notions being essential.”

While the conclusion on this issue is not a simple this-or-that answer and cannot be easily drawn, this paper will nevertheless try to provide adequate evidences in linguistic and psycholinguistic studies and seek for a reasonable conclusion.

Download (25.43 KB)

Reductionism has been one great triumph of the human understanding to the objective universe in the last few centuries. Its belief that essentially everything can be explained in terms of certain fundamental physical events has been greatly encouraged by the vigorous development in various fields of natural sciences, The modern quantum physics, for example, is extraordinarily successful in explaining many microscopic phenomena, giving extraordinarily accurate predictions of microscopic systems, and hence enhancing the development of numerous applications such as computer and nanotechnology. However, arguments against reductionism have never been stopped being raised here and there, and especially in the philosophy of mind, where consciousness and subjectivity comes into the play and creates major difficulties in the doctrine of reductionism. Here we shall give an account for the history of reductionism and the mind-body problem, and try to address a few problems caused by the reduction of consciousness, finally we will see how reductionism can possibly respond.

Download (28.78 KB)

In a conversation, speakers employ different conversational strategies to achieve different purposes. For instance, often times a purposefully made change in the syntactic structure can give certain explicit or sometimes subtle messages to the hearers. For instance, instead of saying directly “Please pass me the salt,” we might say “Could you pass me the salt?1” In changing the sentence from an imperative mood to an interrogative mood, the speaker employs a negative politeness strategy and indicates his respect of the hearer’s willingness to pass the salt.

The interaction between syntactic structures and pragmatic functions has been an interesting and inspiring topic for many past scholars, who have already done a number of researches on it. They have studied, for instance, the functions of different moods, different interrogative forms (wh-questions, yes-no questions, tag questions, etc.) and so on and so forth. However, studies on dislocated structures, which we refer to as non-canonical constructions here, are relatively few. These non-canonical constructions are, however, quite commonly found in colloquial usages as they seem to serve a wide range of pragmatic purposes even at first glimpses. The present study is thus interested in systematically studying the pragmatic functions of three specific non-canonical constructions, namely topicalization (TOP), left dislocation (LD) and right dislocation (RD).

Download (161.87 KB)

This mini project aims to trace the grammatical pathway of ho (可) in Chinese. Ho originally denoted ability and has grammaticalised into modality of permission via several stages. The discussion is according to the grammaticalisation pathway to permission suggested by (Bybee et al. 1994). Following the Introduction section, the pathway is illustrated with the help of can in English in section two. In section three, the tokens of ho taken in ancient Chinese are analyzed. In section four, the pathway for ho would be charted. Finally, section five is the summarized section while the remaining research questions are noted.

Download (21.42 KB)

It is widely known that in the course of second language acquisition (SLA), a learner’s knowledge of the second language (L2) is often influenced by his first language (L1). This statement applies to the different aspects of language learning, from phonetics to morphology, from syntax to pragmatics. The present study is interested in looking at how L1 influences a learner’s L2 pronunciation.

Different languages select different sets of phonemes from the stock of possible sounds human can articulate. As a result, a learner in SLA would often encounter sound segments in L2 which his L1 does not make use of. In such a case, the learner would tend to replace these unfamiliar sounds with the ones available in his L1. What is interesting about this process is how we select replacements for these foreign sounds. It is obvious enough that we do not select replacements randomly, otherwise we could not possibly be able to tell one’s mother tongue simply by the accent of his L2. Instead, it is reasonable to assume that we select replacements as similar as possible to the replaced sounds. The question in hand, then, becomes how we measure the similarity of sounds.

As learning how to pronounce a sound segment is basically learning how to make a certain posture with the articulators, it follows that the differences in different sound segments, or the similarity among them, lie in their articulatory features.

On the other hand, among the sounds available in the selected set of a language, or the phonemic stock of it, some occur more often than the others, while some occur so infrequently that their phonemic status may be doubtful. As replacement is a process of replacing foreign sounds with familiar sounds, it is thus natural to ask how large the effect of the occurrence frequency of the phonemes on the process of replacement is. In other words, is a similar but less frequent sound or a dissimilar but more frequent sound more likely to be selected as a replacement?

In order to suggest an answer to the above question, the present study is going to compare the occurrence frequency of phonemes in five languages, namely Cantonese, Mandarin, Italian, German and American English, and study the common replacements in them.

Download (378.76 KB)

We shall then try to solve and investigate the motion of the planet by using a spreadsheet.

Download (136.32 KB)

衡陽市為湖南省所屬地級市，位於湖南省中南部，湘江中游。地處東經110º32¹16″-113º16¹32″,北緯26º07¹05″-27º27¹24″。東鄰株洲、攸縣、安仁；南界永興、桂陽；西接冷水灘、祁陽、東安、邵陽、邵東；北靠雙峰、湘潭。南北長150 公里、東西寬173 公里。全市面積15,310 平方米，總人口718.95 萬，以漢族為主，另外還有回族、滿族、蒙古族等少數民族。

衡陽因位於衡山之南而得名，其一直為湖南南部之交通輸紐及政治、經濟與文化中心。衡陽於秦時屬長沙郡，自隋朝起稱衡州。清代康熙17 年吳三桂起兵反清，隨後在衡州府稱帝，改國號為周，易名為定天府。至中華民國以後，1914年設衡陽道，1922 年撤銷道制，1937 年成立第五區，1943 年設為省轄市。

Download (465.2 KB)

Right Dislocation is a displacement phenomenon which occurs in many languages, and is rather common in some languages, such as Cantonese. A RD sentence consists of two parts, an α- string and a β-string. The β-string is a part of the α-string, or shares the same referent with a constituent (usually a pronoun) in the α-string. In Cantonese, the α-string is almost obligatorily ended with a Sentence Final Particle. Therefore, a general pattern of RD can be stated as:

(1) α (SFP) β

Traditionally, RD is regarded by functionalists as a mere afterthought repairing to ambiguous uttered sentences. A speaker may utter a sentence as in (2), and soon realizes that the hearer may not understand who they is referring to, thus immediately adds a supplement the cops.

(2) They_i spoke to the janitor about that robbery yesterday, the cops_i.

However, as Cheung (1998) has pointed out, if RD is only an afterthought, which is employed to further qualify or complete the meaning of an uttered sentence, and the α-string and the β-string are only related by discourse, then there should be no theoretical constraints on the β-string. This is however in contrary to the fact. In English, for example, constituents in subordinate clauses cannot be right-dislocated, as shown in (3).

(3) *That they_i spoke to the janitor about that robbery yesterday is terrible, the cops_i.

What this suggests is that RD is indeed a syntactic operation, and can therefore be analyzed syntactically.

Earlier syntactic researches, however, mostly focused on RD in European languages such as English and Italian. Analysis on RD in Cantonese emerged only much more recently. The most comprehensive study of Cantonese RD so far was done by Cheung (1998). In his paper, he contrasted Cantonese RD against RD in European languages, and pointed out the many differences between them. He further categorized RD in Cantonese into three different types, according to their syntactic structures, namely:

1. Pronominal RD (PNRD) and its variant Repeated Copy RD (RCRD);
2. Gap RD (GPRD);
3. Mixed RD (MXRD). (I will elaborate this in §2.2.)

Cheung noted that GPRD is by far the most common type of RD in Cantonese, which accounted by 91.6% of all RD occurrences in his statistics (1998: 10). In view of this, the majority of his analysis focused on GPRD. Subsequent researches on Cantonese RD also paid no particular attention to the other types. One possible reason for this is that while GPRD is usually perceived rather unique to Cantonese, PNRD generally resembles RD in European languages.

In this paper, I will first give evidences to show that GPRD should be identified as a separate phenomenon, rather as RD. I will then show that despite surface similarity with European RD, upon closer inspection, PNRD in Cantonese is in fact different in many ways, and therefore deserves special attention. I will especially compare Cantonese RD with Italian RD, because both of them are pro-drop languages, they therefore share some resemblances which are not found in non-pro-drop languages like English. In addition, since Italian RD is relatively better studied, some of the analysis on Italian can be applied to or at least contrasted with Cantonese.

Download (153.07 KB)