Chinese Language and Discourse - Volume 15, Issue 1, 2024

Abstract

The current paper reports on a study investigating the prosodic features of the Chinese discourse marker haole. The data were collected from 14 native Chinese speakers who participated in two recording sessions designed by the authors. The results indicate that haole as a discourse marker occurring at different syntactic positions is prosodically distinct. Specifically, in some cases, haole at the left periphery (LP) is prosodically independent of its following utterance, while haole at the right periphery (RP) is always prosodically attached to its preceding utterance. In addition, haole at LP is higher, larger, and longer than haole at RP, respectively, concerning pitch, intensity, and duration. The study suggests that these differences are closely related to the pragmatic functions of haole as a discourse marker in oral interaction. The findings above may shed light on the incorporation of prosody into the pragmatic analysis of discourse markers and conversation management in general.

Abstract

The study deals with the sociolinguistic phenomenon of codeswitching as manifested in community-based ethnic-language classes. More specifically, it focuses on teachers’ codeswitching from students’ second language (Mandarin Chinese) to students’ first language (English). The empirical study was conducted at one Chinese community school in the United Kingdom to investigate the instances in which teachers switch to students’ first language and to explore teachers’ introspection regarding their codeswitching behavior. Twelve types of codeswitching were identified and categorized in accordance with functions recorded in other studies. Discrepancies between teachers’ beliefs on the choice of language medium and their actual practices were found. Teachers were not always aware of their codeswitching and they generally held positive attitudes towards their conscious codeswitching and negative attitudes towards subconscious codeswitching. Conscious switches were used mainly for pedagogical, interpersonal, and interactive purposes. A sense of guilt was found to be associated with their unconscious codeswitching. This study suggests that raising teachers’ awareness of the potential usefulness of codeswitching within ethnic-language education is paramount.

摘要

摘要 本文采用会话分析的研究方法，根据汉语自然会话中“反正”引导的话语出现的序列环境和话轮设计方式，证明“反正”作为一种“表明对既存并列项的察觉和选择”的装置（device）在言谈互动中被广泛使用，其基本功能是，交际者在察觉到前文中显性或者隐性地存在着源自不同交际者话语的两个或数个并列项后，通过“反正”引导的话语表明要在其中做出选择的态度。在此基础上，本文还论证了以往研究中提到的“反正”一语所具有的“对不同意见的坚持”“表示让步”“态度指示”“回归话题”和“总结”等功能都是由上述功能衍生而来的。最后，本文明确了“反正”作为互动行为资源，具有“暗示对比”和“实现对话题的控制”等功能。

Abstract

Colloquialization has been identified as one of the most crucial change processes of the English language, through which written genres gradually shift towards spoken styles. Colloquialism refers to the synchronous features resulting from colloquialization. There is limited research into the lexical and phrasal patterns indicating colloquialism in Chinese or how Chinese colloquialism manifests in different spoken and written genres. To extract the lexical and phrasal patterns indicating colloquialism in Chinese, this study used a corpus-driven approach to determine and compare keywords and phrase frames from two training Chinese corpora and those keywords and phrase frames with higher frequencies were retained for further testing.

Abstract

This paper introduces the DMC Corpus – a newly collected dataset of 150 mundane cell phone calls from Mainland China in Mandarin Chinese (audio and detailed transcripts) – which is now publicly available for use in research and teaching. In this report, we first describe the constitution and current contents of the DMC Corpus, as well as instructions for access. Additional calls will be added periodically to the Corpus, and so the quantitative overview presented here should be considered conservative. We then provide concrete examples of the sorts of phenomena that might be explored with these new data, underscoring how the Corpus offers researchers the ability to build systematic collections for analysis – no matter whether researchers prefer to begin with ‘forms’ (e.g., utterance-final particles), with ‘functions’ (e.g., complaining), and/or with the temporal organization of interaction itself (e.g., preference organization, repair). The paper concludes with an explicit call for increased research on Mandarin conversation, to which we hope the materials in the DMC Corpus will contribute.

This article reviews Language, Multimodal Interaction and Transaction

This article reviews Loanwords in the Chinese language