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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Word order and emergence of meaning in French and Chinese

subject

description

French and Chinese, both geographically and linguistically classified, are two languages that are far apart and show different language tendencies. According to G. Guillaume, Chinese is a ‘character language’ and French is a ‘word language’. Xu Tongqiang considers Chinese to be a ‘language with a semantic dimension’ and the Indo-European ‘languages are languages with a syntactic-morphological dimension’. According to us, it is assumed that Chinese is a ‘semantically oriented language’ while French is a “syntactically oriented language”. Faced with this typological difference, we consider that the basic level in Chinese grammatical analysis is based on a relative dualism 'characters-words' and that in French on a single level, the level of words. Therefore, it is expected that the comparison of word order between the two languages and the position of “meaning” in Chinese and French will prove this hypothesis. In our opinion, meaning and word order influence each other. To confirm this interrelation between form and meaning, we mainly use word order because of its materialization. However, because there is no perfect method suitable for Chinese grammatical analysis, there are still difficulties in the analysis of Chinese word order. There are also ambiguities in terms of the identification of grammatical functions in Chinese. Therefore, this study will review such basic concepts as Chinese characters, morphemes / lexemes (in French), words, phrases (in French) / “duanyu” (in Chinese), and sentences, so that the research on Chinese grammatical functions can be dealt with later, for grammatical function is the core of word order. By reviewing different linguistic approaches, we believe that the three-dimensional theory is the most appropriate for the identification of grammatical functions in Chinese. Finally, in the process of analyzing the word order of Chinese and French, the status of “meaning” is carefully observed in the two languages, and the basic structural unit of Chinese is believed to be the pairs of “character-word”, while those in French are “words”.