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Taiwanese Southern Min abounds with verbal complexes. Among them, phasal complexes, resultative complexes, and directional complexes are alike in that their second component denotes some sort of result. Moreover, they behave similarly in that they can occur in V-hoo-V, V-e/be-V, and V-bo-V forms. Despite these similarities, they still differ from one another in several aspects, such as whether objects are allowed inside or after the verbal complex, whether infixing signals change of their basic meaning, etc. This paper examines their individual properties and proposes that these three types of verbal complex are all different from one another in their formation, which then explains the differences in their syntactic behavior. Directional complexes are syntactic phrases, resultative complexes are compounds derived in the syntax, and while some phasal complexes are also syntactically derived compounds, the others are compounds formed in the lexicon. This paper aims to argue that words (or compounds in this case) can be formed in the syntax as well as in the lexicon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Publications from mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, though in essentially the same language, nevertheless display certain significant differences in choice of vocabulary. Especially striking are differences in the way non-Chinese proper nouns are rendered into Chinese in the three regions. This phenomenon has created difficulty for readers, and generated confused communication in the overseas Chinese mass media. In addition, it has created one more source of difficulty for non-Chinese learners of the Chinese language. This paper is a comparative study of this phenomenon. It analyses the existing practices for the transliteration of non-Chinese proper nouns into Chinese, identifies points of commonality and difference among the three regions, and seeks to establish both the nature of the problem and possible ways of dealing with it. Its findings, apart from their purely linguistic interest, have practical relevance both for translators and for learners of Chinese.

This paper discusses the validity of the tree model of evolution for the particular case of Sinitic languages (or Chinese dialects). Our approach is lexically based, using standardized word lists. First, these lists were tested for their congruence, as they are supposed to have evolved at different rates. Then, we undertook a phylogenetic analysis, using both a distance-based lexicostatistical method and a character-based maximum parsimony method. The traditional classification of Chinese dialects is recovered to various extents depending on the method and on the word list used, but the character-based analysis of the 200 Swadesh word list outperforms all other analyses. Finally, the validity of the branching patterns obtained was tested using a variety of techniques. Although the data fits the inferred trees well, the topology of these trees is collapsed to a star-like pattern when investigated through resampling methods. The application of a network method confirms that the development of these Sinitic languages is not tree-like, highlighting the fact that in cases like this tree-reconstruction methods can be misleading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]