Morphological Changes of Chinese Under the Influence of Language Contact: The Usages of Suffix –men Before and After the May Fourth Movement and Its Current Usages

Abstract

: The study examines the diachronic changes during the May Fourth Movement and synchronic variation of the current use of the suffix -men , based on data from two corpora, Center for Chinese Linguistics (CCL) and Text of Recent Chinese (TorCH). Investigation in CCL shows that the suffix -men had already been used as a plural marker of human nouns in Qing Dynasty, while the usage of the suffix -men spreads from human to non-human nouns after the May Fourth Movement. Meanwhile