Who says men can never change

A corpus-based study of recent changes in the use of the Chinese plural suffix men

Bibliographic Data

ID21458366
AuthorsAngela Cook (0000-0002-3232-8508, The University of Queensland), Dongchen Yao (The University of Queensland), Dongmei Yao (0000-0001-7613-533X, The University of Queensland)
Year2025
Publication date2025-03-18
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAustralian Review of Applied Linguistics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0155-0640 • E-ISSN: 1833-7139
PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1075/aral.24059.coo
OpenAlexW4408549559
LanguageEN
References cited23

Language change in Modern Standard Chinese has been an area of research interest for several decades. However, the field continues to be characterized by a focus on written Chinese, with a lack of systematic, fine-grained analyses of specific morphosyntactic features in spoken Mandarin and a dearth of diachronic spoken data. This paper aims to address these shortcomings by examining recent developments in the use of the plural marker men based on an analysis of its use in a diachronic corpus of spoken Mandarin spanning 2005 to 2020. The study reveals several indications of language change, including an increase in the overall frequency of use, a shift in the semantic distribution of nouns undergoing pluralization, and a weakening of the correlation with definite reference. Incipient changes in the use of the plural marker men in spoken Mandarin suggest a trend in morphological patterns of behavior in some contexts towards those of plural suffixes in languages with obligatory grammatical marking for number. The pedagogical implications of this research are also discussed

Sociology · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Psychology

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