Schizophrenia Through the Lens of Chinese Classifier: A Preliminary Study

Schizophrenia Through the Lens of Chinese Classifier: A Preliminary Study Abstract Previous studies conducted within Western schizophrenic patients with formal thought disorder (FTD) have shown that abnormalities occur at different levels of linguistic structures. However, linguistic manifestation of FTD in Mandarin Chinese is rarely discussed in the literature. The principal question concerned in this preliminary study is to explore how people with Chinese FTD misuse classifiers (CL) and how the pattern of misuse could illuminate the linguistic dimensions of FTD. Unlike other Chinese-specific properties such as the absence of articles and the pervasive occurrence of phonetically null arguments, Chinese CLs are prominent features of the language and almost always overt. Further, since they have both a grammatical and a lexical dimension, Chinese CL could serve as a probe to test whether there is a linguistic etiology of FTD, and whether it is grammatical or lexical in nature. 1 Introduction Ever since the early 20th century, Formal Thought Disorder (henceforth, FTD) of schizophrenia, or disorganized speech, is regarded primarily as a disorder of ‘thought’, rather than a ‘linguistic’ one (Bleuler 1911; Kraepelin 1913). However, language abnormalities are central in understanding schizophrenic symptoms and FTD in particular. FTD is an attempt to capture descriptively the observation that the speech of some patients with schizophrenia is difficult to follow, amounting in some cases to complete incomprehensibility. As these problems happen, over the years there have been important attempts to account for the phenomenon in linguistic terms. One tradition has been that FTD is actually a form of fluent dysphasia. This view dates back to Kleist (1914). Kleist believed that the symptoms of psychosis were essentially similar to those produced by focal brain lesions, and could ultimately be understood as dysfunction of these regions. Since then, language abnormalities have been extensively studied. Although linguistic structures at various levels have been found to be problematic in FTD, including phonology, lexical-semantics, syntax, pragmatics (Chapman et al. 1964), discourse (Rochester & Martin, 1979) and grammar-based meaning in general (Hinzen & Rosselló, 2015), there is no consistent explanation on why it affects all levels of linguistic structures. Further, it is still not clear how linguistic problems of FTD are manifested in typologically different languages. By working on the Chinese manifestation of this symptom, this preliminary research will also discuss whether previous linguistic hypothesis of FTD has cross-linguistic validity or not. In previous studies conducted by Hinzen and coworkers (Çokal et al. 2018, Sevilla et al. 2018), grammatically organized entity-referring tracking devices including pronouns or (in)definite nominal phrases (NP) are examined in Spanish and English people with FTD. However, these elements are mostly not phonetically overt or manifest in Mandarin Chinese in general as opposed to Standard Average European (SAE) languages. The absence of articles and the pervasive occurrence of phonetically null arguments/participants in Chinese made it necessary to explore other factors to reveal linguistic problems of FTD. The Chinese CL system provides a unique opportunity in this regard. On the one hand, different from other grammatical markers, Chinese …

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