How do you know what I’m going to say? The use of advance organisers in modern standard Chinese

The use of advance organisers (Clyne 1987) are common in English. In this article, we divide advance organisers into two types – those that signpost the structure of the discourse for a listener and those that signpost the content of the discourse for the listener. Data of extended spoken discourse in Modern Standard Chinese (MSC) shows that, while advance organisers that signpost structure are common in MSC, advance organisers that signpost content are rare. Implications of this for language teaching and cross-cultural communication conclude the article.