3. The History of Mandarin (Chinese Language)

This part is the sub topic of Theoretical Framework in Chapter II Theoretical Approach and Framework of the research entitled "A Comparative study between Mandarin and English phonological System".

Since ancient history, the Chinese language has always consisted of a wide variety of dialects. Confucius, for example, used yǎyán, or "elegant speech". It is a little bit different from daily dialects. Besides, text during the Han Dynasty refers to tōngyǔ, or "common language". However, all of these standard dialects were probably unknown outside the educated elite; even among the elites, pronunciations may have been very different, as the unifying factor of all Chinese dialects was a written standard, not a spoken one.

The Ming Dynasty (1368 - 1644) and the Qing Dynasty (1644 - 1912) began to use the term guānhuà or "official speech". It refers to the speech used at the courts. The term "Mandarin" comes directly from the Portuguese. The word mandarin was first used to name the Chinese bureaucratic officials (i.e., the mandarins), because the Portuguese, under the misapprehension that the Sanskrit word (mentri) that was used throughout Asia to denote "an official" which had some connection with the Portuguese word mandar (to order somebody to do something), and having observed that these officials all "issued orders", chose to call them mandarins. Because of this case, the Portuguese immediately started to use the special language that these officials spoke amongst themselves as "Guanhua" "the language of the mandarins", "the mandarin language" or, simply, "Mandarin". It is a fact that Guanhua was, to a certain extent, an artificial language based upon a set of conventions. It is precisely what makes it such an appropriate term for Modern Standard Chinese (i.e., Northern Chinese family of languages for grammar and meaning, and the specific pronunciation of Beijing for its utterance).

It seems that during the early part of this period, Beijing dialect became increased. In the 17th century, the Empire had set up an Academy as an effort to make pronunciation conform to the Beijing standard. But these attempts just had little success. At 19th century, it is difficult for the emperor to understand some of his own ministers in court, who did not always try to follow any standard pronunciation. Nevertheless, by 1909, fall of Qing Dynasty had established the Beijing dialect as guóyǔ, or the "national language".

After the Republic of China was established in 1912, there was more success in promoting a common national language. A Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation was convened with delegates from the entire country. At first there was an attempt to introduce a standard pronunciation with elements from regional dialects. But this was deemed too difficult to promote, and in 1924 this attempt was abandoned and the Beijing dialect became the major source of standard national pronunciation, due to the status of that dialect as a prestigious dialect since the Qing Dynasty. Elements from other dialects continue to exist in the standard language, but as exceptions rather than the rule.

In 1949, the Republic of China People continued the effort. In 1955, guóyǔ was renamed pǔtōnghuà or "common speech. After the handovers of Hong Kong, the term pǔtōnghuà is used in Special Administrative Regions of the People Republic of China, and the pinyin system is widely used.

In both mainland China and Taiwan, the use of Standard Mandarin is the main language used in the educational system. As a result, Standard Mandarin is spoken fluently by most people in Mainland China and in Taiwan. However in Hong Kong, due to historical and linguistic reasons, the language of education and both formal and informal speech remains the local Standard Cantonese but standard Mandarin is becoming increase.

The advent of the 20th century has seen many profound changes in Standard Mandarin. Many polite and humble words which were in use in imperial China have almost entirely disappeared in daily modern-day’s conversation. Standard Mandarin, such as jiàn (my humble) and guì (your honorable).

2. Phonological System

This part is the sub topic of Theoretical Framework in Chapter II Theoretical Approach and Framework of the research entitled "A Comparative study between Mandarin and English phonological System".


a) Phonology & Phonetics
Phonology is the study of sound systems and abstract sound units such as phonemes and distinctive features. In phonology, there is a subfield of segmental phonology. It deals with the analysis of speech into phonemes (or segmental phonemes), which correspond fairly well to phonetic segments of the analyzed speech. (“Segments”, 2007: par. 4).
Fromkin and friends (1990: 64) state that Phonology is the study of the sound patterns of human language; it is also the kind of knowledge that speaker has about the sound patterns of their particular language. According to Hyman (1975: 2), Phonology has been defined as the study of sound systems, that is, the study of speech sounds structure and function in languages.
According to Fromkin and friends, Phonetics is the study of speech sounds that are utilized by all human language to represent meanings (1990: 27). Another source states that Phonetics is the study of the sounds of human speech. It is concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds (phones), and their production, audition and perception (“Segments”, 2007: par. 6).
According to Hyman, a phonetic study tells how the sounds of a language are made and what their acoustic properties are. A phonological study tells how these sounds are used to convey meaning (1975: 2).

Phonetics has three main branches:
1) articulatory phonetics, concerned with the positions and movements of the lips, tongue, vocal tract and folds and other speech organs in producing speech;

2) acoustic phonetics, concerned with the properties of the sound waves and how they are received by the inner ear; and

3) auditory phonetics, concerned with speech perception, principally how the brain forms perceptual representations of the input which is received.

There are over a hundred different phones recognized as distinctive by the International Phonetic Association and transcribed in their International Phonetic Alphabet. International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a system of phonetic notation based on the Latin alphabet, devised by the International Phonetic Association as a standardized representation of the sounds of spoken language. The IPA is designed to represent only those qualities of speech that are distinctive in spoken language: phonemes, intonation, and the separation of words and syllables. To represent additional qualities of speech such as tooth-gnashing, lisping, and sounds made with a cleft palate, an extended set of symbols called the Extended IPA is commonly used.(International Phonetic Alphabet, 2008: par. 1)

b) Phoneme
It is known that phoneme is the smallest structural unit that distinguishes meaning. Phonemic is a transcription that only indicates the different phonemes of a language. Such transcriptions are enclosed within virgules (slashes), / /; these show that each enclosed symbol is described as phonemically meaningful. Besides, a transcription that indicates more detail, such as allophonic variation is called phonetic, and is enclosed in square brackets, [ ]. (“Phoneme”, 2008: par. 1)
Fries states that phonemes are not a letter although sometimes a letter of alphabet may represent a phoneme, as the p in pin, but a phoneme is never a letter; it is a unit of sound. Hanzi Chinese does not have alphabetical letter, yet it has phonemes. (1957: 9). Phoneme is different from letter; the letter p in telegraph does not represent the phoneme /p/ there.
According to Fromkin and friends (1990: 66), the first rule to determine the phonemes of any language is when two different forms are identical in every way except for one sound segment that occurs in the same place in the string is called minimal pair. Another source states that phonemes could be assigned if two sounds which are phonetically similar occur in the same phonetic environment, and if the substitution of one sound for the other results in a difference meaning (Hyman, 1975: 60). For examples of minimal pairs are sip and zip; man and can; run and fun; those words are minimal pairs.

c) Allophone
In phonetics, an allophone is one of several similar phones that belong to the same phoneme; speakers of a particular language perceive a phoneme as a single distinctive sound in that language. Thus an allophone is a phone considered as a member of one phoneme (“Allophone”, 2007: par.1). For example, [pʰ] as in pin and [p] as in spin are allophones for the phoneme /p/ in the English language because they occur in complementary distribution. English speakers generally treat these as the same sound, but they are different; the first is aspirated and the second is unaspirated (plain). Plain [p] also occurs as the p in cap [kæp], or the second p in paper [pʰeɪ.pɚ]. In contexts where plain p appears in English like spin, cap, paper, speakers may hear it as b since the p in these contexts lacks the burst of air found with the “p” in pin.

d) Suprasegmental Phoneme or Prosody.
In phonetics, segment is used primarily “to refer to any discrete unit that can be identified, either physically or auditorily, in the stream of speech”. (“Segment”, 2007: par.1). So that, segment is a phonetic alphabet which represents individual speech sound. Besides, suprasegmental phoneme is acoustic properties of speech that cannot be predicted from a local window on the orthographic (or similar) transcription. (“Prosody”, 2007: par.1). These properties are pitch, length, and stress. In this research, the researcher only focuses on pitch (tone).

A speaker in all language has an ability to control the pitch of his voice including when a speaker is speaking. There are two kinds of controlled pitch movement; it is high-voice pitch and low-voice pitch. These movements are known in human language as tone.

Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish words. All languages use intonation to express emphasis, contrast, emotion, or other such atmospheres, but not every language uses tone to distinguish lexical meaning (“Tone”, 2007: par.1). According to the explanation about tone, it is very closely related to the pitch, or frequency of the voice. According to Laver in Man Gao, there are two types of tone system: word-based tone system and syllable-based tone system. Some languages -such as English- use word-based tone system whose pitch is associated with the entire word. But Mandarin Language uses syllable-based tone system whose pitch is associated with the syllable (2002: 6-7).

Tone Language is a language that uses pitch of individual syllables to contrast meanings (Hyman, 1975: 85). Tonal language has two broad categories: Register tone systems and contour tone systems. Register tone systems is tones that signal meaning differences. But in some languages, tones change pitch on single syllables. Moving pitches that signal meaning differences are called contour tone system.
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Other Topics of research are here.

A SEMANTIC STUDY OF IDIOMS USED IN ANTOINE FUQUA’S TEARS OF THE SUN

ABSTRACT

This research entitled A Semantic Study of Idioms Used in Antoine Fuqua’s Tears of the Sun is aimed at giving the description of idioms in the film. It focuses on the forms and the types of Idiom and the relationship between the idiomatic meaning and the literal meaning of individual words of the Idiom commonly used in the film.

This research belongs to qualitative type. It does not use any statistical procedure. The writer takes Idioms in the film. The process of collecting the data analysis includes data reduction, data display and data conclusion drawing. First, data reduction is done. In this stage, the data are selected. Data reduction involves the film which contains the idiom. The second step is display. The selected data are analyzed and classified. The idiom is classified into the forms and types and the relationship between the idiomatic meaning and the literal meaning of individual words in idiom. Based on the display of the data, the idiom words in Tears of the Sun film are analyzed carefully to find out the forms and types of idiom and the relationship between the idiomatic meaning and the literal meaning of individual words in idiom.

The result of the study shows that the idioms found in Tears of the Sun film are based on the forms and types and the relationship between the idiomatic meaning and the literal meaning of individual words in idiom. The forms of idiom found are idiom of two-merged verb, idiom of three merged verb, idiom of separable verb, and idiom of inseparable verb. The types of idiom found are ideational idiom, interpersonal idiom and relational idiom. The relationship between the idiomatic meaning and the literal meaning of the Idiom can be analyzed into idiomatic meaning merged literal meaning, idiomatic meaning added some part of literal meaning, and idiomatic meaning is different from literal meaning’s

COHESION IN THE COMIC STRIP “THE BORN LOSER” IN THE JAKARTA POST

ABSTRACT

The research entitled “Cohesion in The Comic Strip The Born Loser in The Jakarta Post” is intended to reveal the cohesive ties formed in the comic strips The Born Loser in Jakarta Post and the portion of each of the types that takes place.

This research belongs to a descriptive qualitative research since the data are presented qualitatively and analyzed descriptively. It describes the condition of the data in whatever it is. The object of the research is grammatical and lexical cohesion in the comic strip The Born Loser in Jakarta Post. The researcher takes the data from The Jakarta Post daily newspaper. In collecting the data, this research is done by using observation method to the determined comic strips and tapping technique. The researcher discusses based on the types of cohesion in the comic strip the Born Loser by observing cohesive items in each sentence number of each edition and describing distance of items and also finding out presupposed item. Finally, she accounts the portion of each the types that take place.

This research shows that the types of cohesion in the comic strip the Born Loser are reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, reiteration and collocation. While, most of the direction is anaphoric with the presupposed element preceding. The forms of presupposition are immediate tie, mediated tie and remote tie and also there are some formed ties which are both mediated and remote. Then, it also shows the distance separating the presupposing from the presupposed item that is the number of intervening sentences. Whereas, from the data of the identified cohesive items, the greatest portion of the grammatical cohesion type is reference and the lowest is substitution. While reiteration particularly repetition is the greatest portion of the lexical cohesion type and the lowest is synonym. Of the grammatical cohesion, the reference is about 53.33%, substitution is about 2.66%, ellipsis is about 27.11%, and conjunction is about 16.88%. Reference type particularly personal reference is more dominant than others as it, in the text, acts to keep track of participants throughout the text. Whereas, the lowest frequency is substitution particularly verbal substitution because, to avoid the redundancy of repetition of lexical item is more effective by omitting. While, from the lexical cohesion, reiteration is about 71.31% and collocation is about 28.67%. While the form of reiteration particularly repetition form is the most dominant because it is to keep track the timing, characters and events. Whereas, the synonym is the lowest frequency because to state the same meaning in repetition form more often is stronger impressive than in synonym form.

MAXIM ANALYSIS ON PRAIRIE SONGS BY PAM CONRAD: A PRAGMATIC STUDY

ABSTRACT

The research entitled Maxim Analysis on Prairie Songs by Pam Conrad; a Pragmatic Study tries to analyze the utterances uttered by the characters in the novel Prairie Songs by Pam Conrad dealing with observance and non-observance in applying Grice’s cooperative principle and Leech’s politeness principle. The objectives of the research are to identify the kinds of maxim in the utterances uttered by characters in Prairie Song, and to find out violations of maxim in the utterances uttered by characters in Prairie Songs.

This descriptive qualitative research uses pragmatic approach which refers to the speaker and the hearer as the participants in communication. In this analysis, the writer uses noting and recording technique to collect the data, then it is followed by its following techniques. The obtained data from the object of the research are analyzed by using Referential Method .

The result of the analysis shows that the writer finds ninety utterances which have obeyed and violated maxim. From those identified utterances, forty six utterances have obeyed cooperative principle while twenty four utterances have obeyed politeness principle, and also eighteen utterances have violated cooperative principle; those are quality maxim, quantity maxim, relation maxim and manner maxim.