Chinese Language and Discourse - Volume 14, Issue 2, 2023

This paper revisits the use of the shi…de construction, based on the analysis of structures with predicative adjectives in a 500,000-character corpus of spoken Mandarin assembled from transcripts of a popular Chinese chat show. Overall, de was omitted more than 40% of the time with a predicative adjective, a significantly higher rate than that found in previous studies. The data reveal a number of factors that may all play a role in determining the likelihood of de omission or retention: the time dependency of the adjective, the particular intensifier chosen to modify the adjective, the discourse function of the utterance and the presence of certain markers of epistemic modality. The findings also lend support to the hypothesis that shi is grammaticalizing to a bound morpheme in some so-called ‘conventionalised forms’ involving epistemic and evidentiality markers.

When collected methodically through elicitation experiments, invented examples prompted by a cue word provide evidence for how speakers think about that word. This study explores characteristics of Mandarin chī ‘eat’ sentences obtained through an elicitation experiment and SMS, newspaper, and fiction corpora. Our findings support the view that invented examples collected methodically represent a valuable data type with its own characteristics worthy of attention and analysis.

This paper is a socio-linguistic report of Veun Sai, a small Cambodian village in the Northeastern province of Ratanakiri near the border of Laos and Vietnam. The village is located in a multi-lingual context where Hakka Chinese, Khmer, and Laotian are spoken side-by-side and each language has a distinct role. Hence, the Veun Sai Chinese village is in fact a multi-cultural village bound together by a Chinese thread. This paper provides background on Chinese communities Cambodia historically and considers issues of identity relevant to Sino-Cambodians generally. The report is based on short interviews with 20 residents.

Chinese is the language of legislation and of court and administrative procedures in several jurisdictions as well as in numerous international organizations. Its legal status differs from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and displays its pluricentric character. Legal acts that are issued in these jurisdictions demonstrate therefore different levels of terminological formation and other legal-linguistically relevant varieties. It is the task of legal lexicography to register lexical varieties of legal Chinese in the relevant jurisdictions. However, in addition to all lexicological and lexicographical efforts, the question could be asked whether terminological harmonization constitutes the appropriate answer to problems caused by pluricentric Chinese legal terminology. It could be claimed that the task of legal linguists is not only to research but also to shape the Chinese legal language. There exist, in fact, examples of such activities that will be closely scrutinized in this article.

This article presents findings pertaining to digital you-narratives in which ungendered third person Chinese pronoun ta is embedded. The study asks what implications the script choice ta, as opposed to gendered 他 ta ‘he’ and 她 ta ‘she’, has for the facilitation of situational empathy when used in conjunction with specific and generic 你 ni ‘you’. The study draws on 131 digital texts from celebrity verified accounts on social media platform Sina Weibo in October 2015. From a Discourse Analytical perspective, the study utilizes pragmatic and textual approaches under a constructivist narrative analysis framework to examine the facilitative role of ta in relation to empathy invoked in readers. The study proposes that ta is a pragmatic resource used to facilitate the co-construction of emergent narratives based on situational empathy. The implications of said findings are discussed along with future avenues of research.

Adversative passives like Mandarin Chinese bei-passives are known to convey adversity, but what “adversity” means specifically for speakers of bei- in conversational discourse remains unknown. Whereas previous studies examine adversity within the bei- clause, this study uses the lens concept to investigate speakers’ subjective evaluations of the event attested by the larger context beyond the bei- clause. Using a subjectivity coding scheme and the discourse adjacent alternation method, I analyzed 4,203 values of event valence of 1,401 bei- utterances and 65 alternations in spontaneous talk show conversations. Results show that: (1) The same event that a speaker evaluates as “adverse” using bei- is sometimes evaluated as “non-adverse” using non-bei structures. (2) The same bei+verb phrase that previous studies may deem “adverse” can be evaluated as “adverse” or “positive” by actual speakers. (3) 84.5% (1,184/1,401) of the time, bei-passive in conversation expresses speakers’ evaluation that a causative event is adverse for the affectee, regardless of what reality is. (4) Adversity means undesirable, disadvantageous, morally or socially wrong, empathy-deserving, and/or sympathy-deserving for speakers of bei-. The findings indicate that the adversity that bei- conveys is not an objective description of reality but a subjective evaluation independent of reality–the Adversity lens. This study sheds light on subjectivity and specific manifestations of adversity in conversational discourse.

This study delves into the stylization of a unique and dynamic Hong Kong identity through examining a series of Cantonese standup comedies performed by the Hong Kong comedian, Wong Tze-wah, from 1993 to 2003. It explains the ways that Wong’s standup comedies become the stylistic and semiotic resources which not merely iconically and symbolically represent the reality of Hong Kong society; rather, they index many modalities of Hong Kongers’ questioning of authenticity and the relationship between China and Hong Kong. It suggests that the comic performance, as a meaning-making process, helps to shape and reproduce the local ideologies of identity, and to challenge the power underlying the discourse of China-Hong Kong relations.