语言学人｜柯理思：行走在研究和教学之间

图片来源：陕西师范大学语言资源开发研究中心官网

行走在研究和教学之间

   语言学人（第9期）

柯理思

    摘  要：本文是对著名语言学家柯理思教授的访谈。柯理思教授首先介绍了自己如何与不同语言结缘并且巧妙地运用自己的语言背景进行学术研究。然后柯理思教授谈到了她对于汉语研究中不同领域的浓厚兴趣，而且描述了自己看待汉语的独特角度。此外，柯理思教授表示学界需要创造一些多语言的作品从而使汉语语言学研究走向世界。柯理思教授还讲述了她面对东西方学生的汉语教学经历，以及出国留学对于学生未来学术发展的帮助。

    关键词：柯理思  多语言  汉语语言学界  汉语研究  口语  书面语  语言教学

【Interviewee】

Christine Lamarre（柯理思）, Professor of Chinese Language at National Institute for Oriental Languages and Cultures. She graduated from the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at the University of Bordeaux in 1976. Between 1977 and 1979, she studied at Liaoning University and Fudan University respectively. She completed her Ph.D. degree at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS- the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) in 1985. From 1981 to 1986, she studied for her doctrine degree of Chinese linguistics at University of Tsukuba and received her Ph.D. degree in 1987 there. She was a professor at the University of Tokyo (1998-2009), the president of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics and the European Association of Chinese Linguistics. Her research interests focus on grammars of Mandarin Chinese and Chinese dialects. Published works: A Grammar and Lexicon of Hakka: Historical Materials from the Basel Mission Library (with Hilary Chappell) , etc.

【Interviewer】 

施今语，牛津大学实验心理学博士生，爱丁堡大学语言学硕士，伦敦大学学院心理与语言科学学士（采访时为高中期间）。 

【Time】

07/23/2016 

【Place】

Beijing Language and Culture University

柯理思先生与施今语合影

【开场白】

Shi: Good morning, Professor Lamarre! Nice to meet you! I'm a 11th-grade student from the international department of Beijing National Day School. My father is a professor at Beijing Language and Culture University, so under his influence, I've always been interested in linguistics. That's why when I heard about this meeting and knew you were coming to China, I decided to start a project, which is a series of interviews with world-renowned linguists. The project can not only satisfy my own curiosity but can also help high school students who want to learn about linguists and linguistics.

1. Being a Multilingual Researcher

图片来源：上海师范大学对外汉语学院官网

Shi: Ms. Lamarre, I learnt that you are an expert in many languages, like French, English, Japanese, Chinese, and so on. I heard that you were able to teach Chinese using Japanese during your stay in Japan. How did your language background help your research in linguistics?

Lamarre: I am French, so my mother tongue is French. I studied English at school and I went to China for the first time in 1977. I learned Japanese because when I was studying Chinese in Bordeaux (a port on the Atlantic side of France), our Chinese course required us to take either a Sanskrit (an ancient Indian language) course, or a Japanese course. Eventually, I chose Japanese. When I arrived in China in the 1970s, it was too early to enroll in a Ph.D. program for both foreign and native students. In fact, China did not even offer a doctorate course at that time so no one could get Doctor degrees. Therefore, I decided to go to Japan and got a Ph.D. there because Japanese scholars who studied in fields related to Chinese had been producing research of high academic value. They had many famous researchers, like Ota Tatsuo (太田辰夫)，a specialist in the historical evolution of Chinese, whose works have been translated into Chinese in the 1980's. In China, however, because of the Cultural Revolution, academic research had somehow stopped from 1965 to 1979. You can say that my fate with Japanese is strongly related to the history of China. If I had been able to get a Ph.D. in China, I might not have learnt Japanese. It is easy for me to answer your question because the topic I was talking about at the IACL conference a few days ago is linked to my experiences in Japan. When I was teaching Chinese in Japan, I noticed that there were some very strange similarities between Japanese and French. For instance, when you want to say "take money out of one's pocket" in Chinese, you have to say ná chū (i.e. "take out') in two parts; in English you also have to say "take out", but in French, we just have one verb sortir that means

 "take out", Japanese may use a single verb dasu for "take out" too. The way that the languages include one or several pieces of information in a word is called "lexicalization". Many of my colleagues, including French and Chinese colleagues, tend to divide languages into western and eastern languages, but I know that it is not that simple, because I know Japanese too. There are similarities that go beyond the borders between East Asian languages and western languages. Since I learnt Japanese, it is very useful to study those surprising similarities between Japanese and French or those between French and Chinese which that are not observed in Japanese.

Shi: : Why did you choose Chinese as your major topic in the first place?

Lamarre: I came to China in 1977 with many other French students. French and China have had quite a long-lasting relationship. In 1964, they established diplomatic relations, so many students were sent to China to study and work until 1967 during the Culture Revolution. After 1974, the number of exchange students went growing. There was an opportunity for me to choose Chinese and go to China, I think I was just kind of curious at the time. In French, to say that something is "impossible to understand", you say "that's Chinese". I was curious about this strange language, and I wanted to try to study it.

2. Looking into Chinese
    from Different Angles

图片来源：中国社会科学院语言研究所官网

Shi：When I looked up your academic studies online, I found out that your research covers various fields: going from ancient Chinese grammar to modern Chinese grammar, from Standard Mandarin to Chinese dialects, and from linguistics to language teaching. However, your mother tongue is not Chinese. How did you manage such an achievement?

Lamarre：Because I have always been interested in languages themselves and various aspects of linguistics, and I thought being able to research in so many diverse fields could help me understand Chinese better as a foreign scholar.

Shi：Do you think there are differences in focus or viewpoints between you and your Chinese counterparts?

Lamarre：Foreigners who try to describe some aspects of the linguistic system of Chinese may pick up topics differing from Chinese scholars. We can get some kinds of multiple-facet-description because we are attracted by different aspects of languages. When I research on Chinese, I often look at it from the angle of French, English, or Japanese, so that I can find some intriguing and even important phenomena in Chinese. Also, I'm interested in the differences between the written language and spoken language, which is a little different from my colleagues specializing in Chinese dialectology. I believe there are many important facts hidden in the gap between witten and spoken languages, and many of them are strongly related to Chinese dialect diversity. 30 years ago, Professor Zhu Dexi said that to study Modern Chinese you should study Beijing colloquial speech. However, it's very hard nowadays to meet a real Beijingnese in Beijing, and even if you do, their spoken language is close to the standard Chinese (Mandarin) because they are educated. So one of my interests in Northern Mandarin dialects is that they give me a different image, or ilustration, of how Northern Mandarin really works. I'm not a real dialectologist; I just use some dialect data to know more about Chinese as a whole.

3. Popularizing Chinese
    Linguistic Studies

图片来源：陕西师范大学语言资源开发研究中心官网

Shi：During the days I prepared for this interview, I have asked some Chinese linguistic students about you. Most of them are very familiar with you and your works because you often come to China to attend academic meetings or conferences. How do you think Chinese academics and their works may get closer to the rest of the world and be more known abroad?

Lamarre：I think maybe there is still a need to produce more papers and books in English about Chinese studies now. It doesn't mean that everything needs to be written in English. Since I spent a long time in Japan, I noticed that we knew very well what was going on in China because a lot of Japanese scholars frequently went to China and lots of Chinese scholars also came to Japan. In Japan, there are frequent academic meetings in Chinese and we can simply use Chinese to communicate. But when I went back to France, due to family reasons, I found that the number of people who research in Chinese linguistics is reduced. People who teach Chinese in college or middle school, for instance, do not always read academic works and publications, like Studies of The Chinese Language (ZHONGGUO YUWEN) . Somehow, there is a lack of mid-level presentation of Chinese studies, and a need to present recent researches in English, and maybe also in French. Now, I think it is also my responsibility to produce this kind of materials. I have a few colleagues are conscious that we have to produce available academic works and presentations in French too. The Chinese scholars who are able to write in English, for instance, can also help us to produce academic literature in English about Chinese linguistics for linguists who want to know some Chinese specificities but do not read Chinese. Another task is to produce easily understandable literature on Chinese in the mother tongue of people who are studying Chinese or teaching Chinese but who are not academics. These two separate tasks may help to spread Chinese studies. No matter foreign academics or Chinese academics, anyone with the language ability can help with this important job.

4. About Language Education

图片来源：北京语言大学语言科学院官网

Shi：Chinese seems to be one of the hardest languages around the world, and many foreign friends of mine usually complain about it. However, you have taught both French and Japanese people Chinese, what's the difference of your teaching method when you face different groups of people?

Lamarre：You must relativize the difficulty of studying Chinese. For Japanese learners, studying Chinese is not that difficult. I had both experiences in teaching French to Japanese and Chinese to Japanese in similar institutions (Kyoto University and the University of Tokyo) , to the same kind of students that major in other fields like physics, engineering, economics, picking either French or Chinese as their second language. So I can compare the process of studying French or Chinese as L2 for Japanese students. Even a very bright Kyoto University student who has studied two years of L2 French will have many difficulties to understand a daily newspaper such as Le Monde. However, an equally bright student who studied Chinese for the same amount of time and same curriculum can read and understand much more in a Chinese newspaper. Of course, there are historical reasons behind this, like Italians who study French find it very easy, that is the way it is. Still, you can't say that for Japanese it is very easy to study Chinese because the tones are very hard to master for a Japanese learner. But the very difficult words used in Chinese newspapers are easily mastered by Japanese because many of them is commonly, shared since the 19th century, and written with the same characters. The pronunciation of Chinese is very hard for westerners, but it's much easier for Vietnamese because they have similar tones too. So no language is absolutely difficult. The key is the relationship between the learner's mother tongue and the target language.

Regarding Chinese learning, another huge difficulty faced by western students is writing and reading Chinese characters. Many students don't want to study Chinese characters, but they cannot improve their level of expression in the written language if they don't learn them. They would only leam spoken Chinese language that only allows them to interact with others in daily life without being able to read and write. Some people are settled with only knowing the spoken language, which is not good.

Shi：Do you think it's necessary for high school students to learn multiple languages?

Lamarre：Yes, I think it is very useful. Actually, in France now, Chinese is very popular in colleges. In our middle and high schools, we had more than forty-thousand students learning Chinese. For France, it's quite a large number. Chinese is getting even more popular than German, for instance. Now we are developing some technics to teach Chinese in middle schools and high schools, like how many characters students should learn, how we dissociate character-teaching from oral practice and still avoid producing people who are iliterate (because writing is also important for Chinese). Nowadays, we have lots of teachers who teach Chinese in middle schools and high schools. That's why I was saying that we must produce materials to help them because we cannot expect them to read academic magazines and study specific academic research about linguistics. But some of the results of recent studies can modify the way we teach Chinese. It's also very important to learn different languages because it makes your head suppler.

Shi：How many languages do you think we should learn?

Lamarre：Like you already learnt two languages, a third language would be very useful because you can look at your own languages with different eyes.

Shi：Nowadays, there are lots of students who choose to study abroad, like me. Do you think it's necessary for a student to have an experience of studying in another country?

Lamarre：From the point of view of academics, I think staying abroad probably helps you to become more fluent in foreign languages, so it won't be difficult for you to read a lot of documents in other languages. Writing in foreign languages masterly takes time, and you need to go through a process of writing and revising your papers. Practicing foreign languages is much easier when you are in the country because it makes the experience more direct. If you stay in your own country, a lot of things will be indirect. Also, you would be exposed to ideas and ways of thinking that are totally different from your own culture by studying abroad. Learning in a foreign country might belp you to communicate with international scholars more easily, which would benefit your academic development.

Shi：At what age do you think is the best time to study abroad?

Lamarre：I think there are a lot of factors that will influence the time you decided to study abroad, like what is going on in your own country. If you go too early, you may have problems to enter the university system, like in China you have Gaokao. There is no objective answer to this question because we all live in specific societies. In some societies, it's easier to go abroad earlier. In some other societies, you might have such constraints on your curiculum, so that you have more difficulties to face. But obviously, if you go abroad earlier, what you get is more direct. You are learning in a different way. It still depends on the occasion, and many people do not have many choices, like when you are a child you are not alone, so you have to consider whether your parents can go with you or not. It depends much more on your private life and opportunities.

5. Notes to High School Students

图片来源：中国社会科学院语言研究所官网

Shi：Ms. Lamarre, as a world-famous linguist, can you give some notes to high school students?

Lamarre：Chinese often emphasize their written language and achievements. Indeed, the written language is very important, and it works separately from spoken language. But I think the spoken language is also very important. I think high school students should try to attach some importance to the spoken language, its rules, and its own specific expressions. Secondly, to stay attached to your own mother language when you are abroad is important, because the ability to fluently use your mother language would be essential once your study of foreign language reached a certain level. For instance, some of the Chinese students I met find it very difficult to work on Chinese again because they had forgotten how Chinese worked after learning French and living in France for several years. So take care of your own language even if you are abroad. Don't neglect your mother tongue and your mother tongues, the spoken one, the written one, and even the one spoken by your grandmother. That's my advice.

Shi：Thank you.

本文来源：《国际汉语学报》2018年第9卷第2辑

感谢文章作者及采访人施今语授权发布！

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