Researches
From roots to affixes: a case study of semi-affixes in Mandarin Chinese
Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Tsinghua University
Abstract: By a case study of the distribution of three morphemes di(地), quan(权) and zui(罪) in 300 Chinese laws, this essay reports the phenomenon that some bound morphemes commonly thought as being roots, in certain environments, are (1) productive in forming new complex words (2) semantically rigid without triggering idiosyncratic meanings in such complex words (3) always appearing on the final position and (4) serving as the head of the complex words, thus exhibiting the traits of being affixes. But they are not so affixish in that (1) they are not bleached in meaning (2) they are not phonologically eroded (3) they are not specifically selective on the category of their hosts. The result shows the emergence in Mandarin Chinese of derivational affixes that originated from roots.
Informative Design of Music Visualization that Spices up Instrument Practice and Facilitates Self-reflection
Department of Industrial Engineering, Tsinghua University
Abstract: Practicing a musical instrument alone can be both tedious and uneasy to reflect on. Spicing up the process and proving convenient access for reviewing will thus benefit music learners. Standing on a thorough disentangling of the development of CAMIT systems, we propose MelodyShop, a real-time audio-to-visual interactive system that translates music into fun images with comprehensible visual elements to indicate features of the performance and facilitates self-reflection by allowing users to visually adjust the drawings and thus make improvements on the music, so as to explore better performance as well as to establish reference for further practice. We prototyped to examine the feasibility of this novel interaction design.
