LINGUIST List 15.1120

Mon Apr 5 2004

Qs: Crossling Grammaticalization; Chinese Phonology

Editor for this issue: Naomi Fox <foxlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Amy Kuether, Crosslinguistic grammaticalization of 'have'
2. Benedetta Bassetti, Standard Chinese phonology

Hi,

I'm doing some research for a class on grammaticalization of possessive
verbs comparable to English 'have' across languages. I've found a lot of
data for Romance and Germanic languages, as well as Kru languages,
however, I would like to expand my sample to be much wider and hopefully
more representative. Could anyone advise me on languages I should look
into or alternatively, do you know or speak a language which expresses
possession with a verb like 'have' and in which that verb has also
grammaticalized to some extent and if so could you describe this for me?

Thank you for your time and assistance,

Amy

Dear Linguists,

I have a question regarding the phonology of two Standard Chinese
syllables and I would be very grateful for your help.

I would like to know how many phonemes there are in the two Chinese
syllables that are romanised (in pinyin and Wade) as 'wu' and 'yi'. I
looked at the IPA transcriptions of these syllables in various books,
and I found two different transcriptions: (1) /u:/ and /i:/ (or /u/
and /i/) (e.g., Li, C.N. & Thompson, S.A., 1981, Mandarin Chinese;
Huang, R., 1969, Mandarin Pronunciation); (2) /wu/ and /ji/ (e.g.,
Duanmu, S., 2001, The Phonology of Standard Chinese; Goh, Y.-S., 1997,
The Segmental Phonology of Beijing Mandarin).

So, these are my questions:
(1) Do these syllables consist of a vowel or an approximant + vowel? 
(2) How many phonemes can one hear in these spoken syllables?
(3) Which of these IPA transcriptions is most widely used at present?

Thank you very much for any help!
(I will post a summary if I get replies.)

Benedetta Bassetti