Much research on vocabulary to date has contributed to examining vocabulary in written contexts. Vocabulary assessment in spoken contexts, however, has just recently become a burgeoning field for both vocabulary researchers and language testers. Few empirical studies to date have addressed the issue of how vocabulary is assessed in oral examinations. Consequently, little is known about what components of vocabulary knowledge contribute most to L2 English learners' oral proficiency, or whether candidates' vocabulary production is related to raters' subjective assessment of vocabulary in oral examinations. Two arguments are raised in this thesis pertaining to measuring and assessing spoken vocabulary: (1) effectiveness of some vocabulary measures; and (2) vocabulary as a discrete construct in oral examinations. Candidates' spoken vocabulary was investigated in two oral situations: oral proficiency interview (dialogic) and storytelling (monologic) tasks. Vocabulary measures i.e. types, tokens, TTR, D, Vocabulary profile and PLex were employed for an overview of candidates' vocabulary production. Most lexical measures used were able to discriminate at different proficiency levels in both tasks. The results also revealed, however, restrictions on some of the lexical measures in oral contexts. These measures were further used as benchmark statistics of candidates' spoken vocabulary production to compare against raters' subjective assessments of candidates' vocabulary, which was assessed by raters as a discrete construct in six empirical experiments. The scores raters provided, nonetheless, were found to relate more closely to candidates' overall language proficiency than to their lexical statistics. This, without a doubt, raises questions of the reliability of vocabulary scores in oral examinations. Six empirical studies are presented in this thesis, with a combined/mixed method approach (quantitative and qualitative) to data analysis. Experimental segmental ratings, which present a new method of recording and of exploring raters' cognitive process in handling oral data, are adopted to explore raters' decision-making process in assessing vocabulary. The studies in this thesis not only enrich the knowledge of vocabulary measures examined in oral contexts, but raise quite a few concerns in view of vocabulary assessment in oral examinations, e.g. the application of 'range of vocabulary' may be problematic as a stand-alone measure of candidates' lexical resources in oral contexts. The findings in this thesis, together with its overall critical review of the current standing of vocabulary assessment in oral examinations, call for more empirical research of examining vocabulary in spoken contexts, and demand further in-depth investigations of the relationship between the development of L2 learners' lexical proficiency and that of their oral language proficiency.

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This thesis presents a neo-constructionist theory to account for a couple of puzzles centring around the Mandarin directional serial verb constructions (DSVC), such as song tang jin lai ‘send soup enter come'. Mandarin DSVCs are divided into seven types. I first look into the word order alternations observed with certain types of DSVCs. I find that the word order variants differ in telicity and their interaction with the aspectual morpheme le, the potential morphemes de/bu and the negation bu/mei. Then the DSVCs involving no word order alternations are also examined. I compare the distribution of le and the locative object in all types of DSVCs. The relation between the metaphoric interpretation and the syntactic position of directional verbs is also discussed. To cover the data, I propose that syntax first generates an eventuality-encoding structure for the lexical items to be inserted. In this structure, VP is sandwiched between a series of functional projections including ResP, PathP, DeicP, RealiseP and IAsP. VP represents the process of the event; ResP expresses the result state; PathP describes a moving track; DeicP encodes deictic information; RealiseP accommodates the aspect marker le; IAspP calculates telicity value. Different options for the insertion of the directional verbs (under Res, Path or Deic) result in the word order alternations. And the observed syntactic and semantic characteristics of DSVCs can all be captured by the interaction among these projections. The proposal is sympathetic to many other constructionist theories in the belief of an impoverished lexicon, the idea that syntactic structure is basically event structure, and the decompositional approach that spans one item to different heads. Overall, this work not only contributes to our understanding of how DSVCs are syntactically represented, but also shows the explanatory power of the constructionist approach in modelling the human language faculty.

This thesis examines how Xifeng (西风 West Wind, 1936-1949) magazine participated in and contributed to the making of a modern Chinese identity through translating the West and promoting a modus vivendi for being “modern Chinese” among its readers in the 1930s and 1940s. Xifeng was a widely-circulated magazine featuring translated articles from popular Western periodicals, which also successfully promoted indigenous creative writings by learning from magazine articles in the West. This thesis rediscovers Xifeng magazine as an important journal belonging to the Analects school (论语派) of writers in modern Chinese literature and culture. By situating the translation and literary practices of Xifeng in the modern Chinese context, this thesis takes an interdisciplinary approach by engaging insights from both translation studies and modern Chinese literary and cultural studies to investigate the productive agency translation played in the formation of modern Chinese identity. The thesis discusses what means to be modern Chinese through three key issues, namely, modern Chinese language, modern Chinese national selfhood, and modern Chinese woman, and argues that the magazine has contributed to the shaping of a modern Chinese identity with a distinctive modern ethos that favours a moderate and balanced attitude towards the agonies of Chinese modernity.

Textual information written in Chinese now represents a huge knowledge repository. The first step of managing and processing information in written Chinese text is segmentation. The thesis investigates three main issues in Chinese text segmentation: word frequency estimation, ambiguity resolution, and unknown word identification. The latter two issues are addressed in the same segmentation process. Defining Chinese word is a very difficult task. This makes estimating the correct word frequency a challenging task. A main source to obtain the frequencies of words is by constructing Chinese corpus. Many manually segmented Chinese corpora have been produced by different organisations and institutes. The word frequencies obtained from the different standards, however, are not easy to integrate. In this thesis a method is proposed by using multiple corpora to achieve better estimation on word frequencies. The proposed method eliminates the 'human factor' in the process of constructing corpus, thus providing significant saving in human labour while producing text sources for defining Chinese words. The result indicates that by utilising corpora of different types a more balanced word list could be produced. A new method for automatic Chinese text segmentation using evolutionary algorithms and Web search statistical data is outlined in this thesis. This proposed method considers Web text a de facto corpus that updates automatically, thus eliminating the need for statistics training. It treats the segmentation as a process that finds out the best probability of how individual characters are combined into sentences, paragraphs, and articles, thus producing segmentation results that are tailored to the text in question and are independent of segmentation standards.

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This thesis aims to examine the extent to which native languages (Ll) influence interlanguage development and whether there exis,ts a direct link between the suppliance of appropriate morphemes and the presence of their syntactic properties in interlanguage grammars. To answer these questions, this thesis investigates adult second language (L2) acquisition of Mandarin nominal phrases by Japanese and English learners. Four nominal prope1iies shared by Mandarin and Japanese are the classifier projection (ClP), the incompatibility of . \ . the numeral-classifier phrase with the plural marker, adjectival possessives and the co-occurrence of determinative elements, all of which differentiate these two languages from English. T.h is study involves 80 Japanese learners and 80 . English learners (placed at four proficiency levels) and 20 Mandarin native speakers as controls. Two data-collecting tasks are employed in this study: an acceptability judgment task for the four Mandarin nominal prope1iies and a � fill-in-the-blank task for. the semantic selection of Mandarin classifiers. Our results from the acceptability judgment task suggest that Ll transfer is not absolute in L2 Mandarin. More specifically, Japanese learners only transfer adjectival possessives, but not ClP and the co-occurrence of determinative elements, to their initial L2 Mandarin. This absence of Ll transfer of ClP and the co-occurrence of determinative . elements is likely to be due to the markedness in terms of the implicational universal. Intriguingly, it is found that ClP and its associated syntactic specifications are gradually developed in English and Japanese learners' L2 Mandarin. Initially, English and Japanese measure words are incorrectly used to accommodate classifiers, and then ClP is projected without any syntactic specifications. Subsequently, the syntactic specifications of ClP are gradually specified. However, the incompatibility of the numeral-classifier phrase with the plural marker is still underspecified in English and Japanese learners' advanced L2 Mandarin. Remarkably, our results from the fill-in-the-blank task demonstrate that English and Japanese learners' failure to use semantically appropriate Mandarin classifiers does not hinder the presence of ClP and its syntactic specifications in their L2 Mandarin, which suggests that there is no direct linl( between these two. Moreover, the rarity of the positive evidence is argued to play a crucial role in English and Japanese L2ers' acquisition of the co-occurrence of determinative elements, which highlights the importance of input frequency in L2 acquisition. It is also believed to be responsible for a discrepa~cy observed in English learners' acquisition of two adjectival possessive constructions in Mandarin. This dissertation is my own work and contains nothing which is the outcome of work done in collaboration with others, except specified in the text and Acknowledgements. The dissertation does not exceed the regulation length, including footnotes, references and appendices but excluding the bibliography.

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Puxian, a Min dialect of China, has many significant linguistic features. Based on a corpus of spoken data, this thesis sets out to examine aspects of the grammar of pronominal expressions in Puxian, focusing especially on three prominent issues in the linguistic literature, viz. impersonality, reflexive markings and Person effects on linearization. The investigation of impersonality has been built on the latest typological framework (see e.g. Siewierska 2008) and deals with a group of constructions in Puxian that have pronominalized subjects but crucially with impersonal reference. These subjects can be projected onto five semantic domains, i.e. vague, generic, non-referential indefinite, referential indefinite and referential definite, with regard to referentiality and (in)definiteness (cf. Givón 1984: 397). A correlation between these domains and morphophonological realizations of impersonal forms is studied as well. The discussion of reflexive markings focuses on grammaticalization, as different reflexive forms in Puxian assumed interrelated functions along the pathway of grammaticalization. Significantly, some highly grammaticalized functions, e.g. impersonals or anticausatives, are not necessarily associated with more simplified reflexive forms. The attention to linearization is centered on the give morpheme kɛ21, which acts like a case marker in a number of constructions, ranging from the monotransitive, ditransitive, causative, passive and even to the intransitive. Yet the main concern is how the grammatical category of Person as a whole plays a crucial role in the placement of syntactic constituents as well as encodings of argument roles, as against the unmarked AVP word order. Since Puxian dialect has been relatively unknown in linguistics, a sketch of Puxian grammar and language situation will be offered in the beginning.