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Article published In: Australian Review of Applied Linguistics: Online-First Articles

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Who says men can never change?

A corpus-based study of recent changes in the use of the Chinese plural suffix men

ORCiD logo with link | The University of Queensland
 | The University of Queensland
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with University of Queensland.

Published online: 18 March 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/aral.24059.coo
Abstract
Language change in Modern Standard Chinese has been an area of research interest for several decades. However, the field continues to be characterized by a focus on written Chinese, with a lack of systematic, fine-grained analyses of specific morphosyntactic features in spoken Mandarin and a dearth of diachronic spoken data. This paper aims to address these shortcomings by examining recent developments in the use of the plural marker men based on an analysis of its use in a diachronic corpus of spoken Mandarin spanning 2005 to 2020. The study reveals several indications of language change, including an increase in the overall frequency of use, a shift in the semantic distribution of nouns undergoing pluralization, and a weakening of the correlation with definite reference. Incipient changes in the use of the plural marker men in spoken Mandarin suggest a trend in morphological patterns of behavior in some contexts towards those of plural suffixes in languages with obligatory grammatical marking for number. The pedagogical implications of this research are also discussed.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Research findings
    • 4.1Quantitative analysis of the data
      • 4.1.1Frequency of use
      • 4.1.2Semantic classes of head nouns
      • 4.1.3Syntactic structure of NPs
      • 4.1.4Special case: renmen
    • 4.2The functions of men
      • 4.2.1Support for functions noted in the existing literature
        • Addressing a group of people
        • Diminutive function
      • 4.2.2Additional function not previously noted
        • Marker of respect
    • 4.3Weakening of old constraints
      • Syntactic and semantic environments
      • Definiteness vs. indefiniteness
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Frequency of use
    • 5.2Semantic classes
    • 5.3Functions of men
    • 5.4Weakening of constraints
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
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