Why is homophonic discourse possible?
同音文何以可能?
Hengxing He 何恒幸
Abstract 摘要
Professor Yuen Ren Chao (赵元任), ex-president of the Linguistic Society of America, once wrote a homophonic discourse entitled “Shī shì shí shī shĭ 施氏食狮史” (Story of Stone Grotto Poet: Eating Lions) (Chao [1960]1980, 149). But so far, no one knows why such a discourse is possible. This paper makes an attempt to discuss this issue. It is argued that the possibility of homophonic discourse is principally attributed to the fact that unlike English, the Chinese language has a unique bipartite spelling system, i.e., one com-posed of Chinese character spellings and Chinese pinyin spellings, and that they correspond to each other in terms of over 400 Chinese Pinyin syllables with variations through tones which satisfy the phonological, graphological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic premises for the construal of a homophonic discourse.
Subject Keywords 主题词
Homophonic discourse 同音文 Bipartite spelling system 双重拼写系统 Syllable 音节 Chinese character 汉字 Chinese pinyin 汉语拼音 Premise 前提
Journal of Chinese Linguistics vol.47, no.2 (June 2019): 465-496
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