Continuing on from my last grammar post, I thought I would share another concept from a grammar class I’m taking in our TCSL program. This time we are looking at how Chinese fits into the bigger picture.
To truly understand a language, we sometimes have to take a step back and understand how it compares to other languages. This is the process of language typology. One key feature that I’ve found incredibly interesting is a languages principle branching direction, or “how relative clause(s), adverbial subordinate clauses and sentential complementation takes place” (Lust, 1983). Languages therefore, can be broken into two different types: right-branching, and left-branching. English is a largely right-branching language, where as Chinese is a strictly left-branching language, as indicated in the image below.
 |
|||||
| English is a largely right-branching language, where Chinese is a strictly left-branching language. |
Let’s take a look at a few examples of what this means. In a sentence that contains an adverbial clause, or stative verbs (adjectives) the difference between Chinese and English is quite apparent. For example:
English: I went home early {because I was tired}.
Chinese: {因為我累了}，所以就趕早回家了. {Yīnwèi wǒ lèi le}, suǒyǐ jiù gǎnzǎo huí jiā le.
English: He is the man {whom I met yesterday}.
Chinese: 他就是{我昨天遇到的}那個人. Tā jiù shì {wǒ zuótiān yùdào de} nà gè rén.
We can see that the information modifying the main clause appear in totally opposite directions when comparing Chinese and English. The same applies to modifier or attributive clauses. For example:
Chinese: 圖書館的前面很漂亮
English: The front of the library is pretty.
Chinese: 你面前的樓.
English: The building in front of you.
Understanding this type of language typology is not only crucial to fixing those pesky mistakes that we as students like to make, but also to understanding why those mistakes are occurring in the first place. It is easy to write things off as being negative-transfer from your native language, but does that really explain why students make those mistakes?
For native speakers of English, our big mistakes occur when dealing with time, and location. Our brain wants to take these clauses and bits of information and put them at the end of the sentence, because it is how our own language works. But when we understand that Chinese works in the opposite way, we no longer have to rely on our “sense” of the language, or a teacher to correct us. Instead, we can quickly adjust how we view these two completely different types of language and proceed accordingly.
We don’t need to keep putting 昨天 (zuótiān) at the end of the sentence, or put time and location in strange and unnatural sounding places. Instead we can simply remember that the majority of the time, the branches of these two languages just happen to fall on two different sides of the tree.
(Notes and examples have been adapted and translated from Professor Chen’s lectures)