Speaker: Wan Quan
Lecture Abstract
Against the backdrop of China’s growing global influence, a host of Chinglish expressions have gradually evolved into legitimate, colloquial English variants, carving out a distinctive "evolutionary niche" in the English language system. Examining Chinglish through the lens of pidginization in language contact offers deeper insights into core issues in syntactic semantics. This linguistic variety is primarily characterized by simplified morphosyntax, relaxed constraints on word order and collocation, and a prevalence of symmetrical syntactic features.
The shift of Chinglish from stigmatized "erroneous output" to a recognized linguistic variety encapsulates the fundamental principles and potential origins of language evolution. In contrast, "English-style Chinese"—literal translations that transplant English syntactic structures into Chinese—often poses significant cognitive processing burdens for readers. English, a language typified by hierarchical syntax, readily embraces juxtaposed structures under the influence of Chinese in cross-linguistic contact; yet Chinese demonstrates notable resistance to adopting hierarchical syntactic patterns, as such structures heighten cognitive processing difficulty.
This cross-linguistic asymmetry suggests that juxtaposition syntax is more foundational in human language. From the perspective of evolutionary linguistics, the rationale lies in the fact that hierarchical syntactic structures are relatively late-developing, cognitively fragile, and costly to process, thus triggering resistance during cross-system linguistic transfer. Juxtaposition syntax, by contrast, is evolutionarily more primitive: its structures rely less on functional cores and boast far stronger cross-linguistic transferability.
Speaker Biography
Wan Quan is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Linguistics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a Postdoctoral Supervisor, and a doctoral advisor at the School of Liberal Arts, University of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He is a recipient of the Special Government Allowance of the State Council.
Dr. Wan has published over 60 academic papers in prestigious journals including Studies of the Chinese Language, World Chinese Language Teaching, and Contemporary Rhetoric. His monograph The Nature and Function of DE was awarded the Second Prize of the Lü Shuxiang Linguistics Award, and has been translated and published in both English and Korean.
His research centers on theoretical linguistics and syntactic semantics, rooted in the foundational tenets of the cognitive-functional linguistics school. His current research projects focus on Chinese categorial inclusion patterns, symmetrical syntax, verbal interaction, pragmatic and rhetorical studies, English-Chinese contrastive linguistics, and language ideology.