Typological and processing origins of aesthetic prescriptivism in language                  

Charles Chien-Jer Lin, Indiana University

 

Nominalization has long been at the center of criticism by aesthetic prescriptivists and language stylists. Recent ideological discourse about linguistic authenticity has re-associated the surge of nominalized expressions in contemporary Taiwan Mandarin with “linguistic incompetency”, “abnormality”, and “malicious and dangerous western influence” (Yu, 2015). The present study takes on such a linguistic ideology by analyzing the typological and cognitive consequences of nominalization in Chinese and English. I propose that the head-driven constituent complexity hypothesis (Lin, 2011)—that linguistic structures where the head appears late induce greater parsing uncertainty and greater processing cost—accounts for why Chinese and English noun phrases appear different. Comparing complex noun phrases in authentic Chinese texts and in English-to-Chinese translated texts suggests that Chinese relative clauses are shorter and less complex in authentic texts than in translated texts. Nominalization (more specifically, relativization) has therefore been identified as a distinctive feature of translated text and further as a signifier of “western influence”. We further address how the intended pragmatic functions of these nominalized expressions differ from the perceived functions of these expressions from the interpreter’ point of view. Such mismatches have engendered the overall negative stylistic impression towards nominalized expressions by native speakers of Mandarin.