Culturally specific compounds in Chinese could be more effectively studied from a cognitive approach, using the underlying idealized cognitive models defined by Lakoff. It is argued that the formation of Chinese compounds are systematically guided by idealized cognitive models and compounds are semantically compositional. (seven references) (LB)

Discusses three of Lawrence Yep's novels (which portray the Chinese-American experience of being caught between two worlds) as good examples of what literature about ethnic groups should be. (SR)

DeFrancis' recent essay on the development and status of Hanyu Pinyin, "The Why of Pinyin Grapheme Selection," is critiqued, particularly his account of how the Hanyu Pinyin transcription was developed and the argument that it is not only rational but effectively permanent. (LB)

Study of verb-copying in Mandarin Chinese, focusing on its relationship to the thematic structures of verbs and on phrase structures, shows that the function of verb-copying is to highlight the quantity element in a sentence. (21 references) (Author/CB)

A pilot study attempting to determine the feasibility and value of a cognition-based study of classifiers in Chinese demonstrated that the use of the classifier "tiao" was not an arbitrary linguistic device of categorization, but represented some type of human categorization based on an imputed salient perceptual property of extension of…

Presents data from a research project studying tobacco and alcohol use patterns in San Francisco's Chinese community (N=1,808). Results indicate that the prevalence of both tobacco and alcohol use is lower for San Francisco's Chinese population than for the general population. Those who smoke tended to be different from those who drink.…

Reports on increasing difficulties experienced by Chinese students and scholars in obtaining U.S. visas, possibly due to more rigorous examination of individuals in "critical" technological fields following the recent spy case and to the high numbers of Chinese students who do not return to China. Critics claim the visa process is…

Presents the case for treating the "ba" construction in Mandarin Chinese as a verb, considering both language-internal arguments and arguments from universal properties of parts of speech. (Author/VWL)

This article discusses the teaching of Chinese in the general, social, and political context of foreign-language education. It points to the fallacy of assuming that the instructional approaches used in the more commonly taught languages are appropriate for Chinese as well. (12 references) (CK)

Explored the feasibility of using Internet Relay Chat (IRC) to facilitate Chinese language teaching and learning. Describes procedures for organizing and conducting chat sessions and discusses the benefits and problems of using IRC. (Author/VWL)

Argues that cross-cultural communication between Chinese and Americans is sometimes blocked by culture-governed structures of language. Discusses certain culture- and language-related phenomena that can occur in interaction. Demonstrates that some communicative obstacles are immediate consequences of differences in styles of expression, structures…

Describes the MultiText information retrieval system that finds arbitrary passages of text, as opposed to complete documents, that are likely to be relevant. Discusses relevance ranking, term expansion, interactive user interface, and distributed searching used in experiments for TREC-6 (Text Retrieval Conference) in the ad hoc, high precision,…

Proposes a model, based on a "maximum ranking method," for more simply estimating the frequency of any same-frequency words and identifying the boundary point between high-frequency and low-frequency words in a text. This model was used successfully with English and Chinese texts, demonstrating that the frequency of words and number of…

Compared the proportions of nouns and verbs in early vocabularies of English- and Mandarin-speaking toddlers and their mothers. Found that Mandarin-speaking children had relatively fewer nouns and more verbs than English-speaking children. When reading books, children's vocabularies were dominated by nouns but not when playing with toys. Mothers…

Studied the effects of applying an order-analytical, multidimensional scaling method for determining hierarchies among Chinese and Japanese "kanji" characters to be learned. Results for 60 undergraduates who used a computer-assisted instructional program based on the method indicate its usefulness in designing effective instruction. (SLD)