Chinese Language and Discourse - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2011

This study explores the intersubjective and dynamic construction of modal meanings in Chinese discourse. Specifically, it examines the role conversational repair plays in ascertaining the entailments of modal meanings such as obligation, possibility and permissibility, specifying the range of modal strengths, and assigning an emergent and negotiated quality to these meanings. It argues that repair shapes and sharpens speakers’ modal stances, especially when the modal expression is polysemous. Illustrative data are drawn from 30 hours of audio/video recorded interaction in weekend Chinese language schools.

The toneless aspect mark -guo is generally viewed as a perfective marker with experiential function. It appears to be subject to a number of semantic constraints, such as discontinuity, repeatability or recurrence, reversibility, and indefinite reference. This article demonstrates that ‘experiential’ is only one of the three main local functions of -guo. Crucial to the determination of the local function of a -guo clause is the boundedness of the verb constellation: ‘experiential’ (atelic situation, typically Activity verbs), ‘deresultative’ (telic situation, typically Accomplishment and Achievement verbs), and ‘ex-habitual’ (stative verbs). We will first elucidate these three local functions and clarify various semantic constraints of -guo before examining a small corpus of 300 -guo sentences to ascertain the distribution of its local functions in authentic texts. Then we will analyze how these functions are manifested in other languages. The evidence suggests that -guo is untypical as a perfective marker; rather, cross-linguistically the lexico-grammatical exponents of the experiential, deresultative, and ex-habitual functions suggest that -guo behaves more like a perfect marker, hence the ‘perfective paradox’. This paper is intended to be a contribution to general and contrastive aspectology.

This paper examines the emergence of the representation of dialect with Chinese characters (fangyan wenzihua) on the Internet. The online dialect writing is primarily identified as a subject of Internet language and youth language study. The CMC discourse as a hybrid register mixing spoken and written language features facilitates the written use of oral dialect on the Internet. Deviating from the standard Chinese writing system, the Internet-savvy youth transcribe their native dialects on an ad hoc basis, which celebrates multiplicity, creativity, individuality and resists uniformity, standardization, and institutionalization. Taking the SHN website (www.shanghaining.com) as a case study, the paper discusses how the written Shanghai Wu words are explored to mark a distinct visual style and to articulate a distinct local youth identity. Furthermore, this paper examines the dominant strategy of phonetic borrowing in dialect transcription on the Internet. It is argued that diachronically, the youth’s phonocentric obsession tapped into the May Fourth tradition of the baihua vernacular movement that was heavily influenced by the European logocentrism; and synchronically, the celebration of dialect sound on the Internet echoes the contemporary soundscape of local dialects formed in the mass media in recent years.

Like any other living language, Mandarin Chinese is continually evolving and being modified in response to both internal and external pressures. These changes have been studied by numerous scholars, who have concentrated mainly on the written language. This paper chooses to explore whether the changes observed, as in the use of the plural marker men, can also be traced in spoken Chinese. For the purposes of studying language change in progress, archived recordings of television broadcasts were used as a source of spoken language samples. This study focuses on the variety of Modern Standard Chinese spoken in Taiwan, as exemplified in a popular Taiwanese variety show over the period 1996 to 2002. The analysis of the data reveals a number of changes in the use of the plural marker men, with some intriguing gender differences and pragmatic nuances.

This paper examines the nonverbal aspects of turn taking system in Mandarin Chinese talk-in-interaction. Based on the audio and video data collected from real conversational settings in Chinese universities, this project uses conversation analysis (CA) theory to analyze how university-educated Mandarin Chinese speakers utilize various nonverbal resources with reference to turn yielding, turn up-taking and turn maintaining strategies to achieve effective interpersonal communication . The research results show that the current speaking party (SP) and listening party (LP) use nonverbal tokens such as hand drop in yielding turns, gaze and touch in taking up turns, and non-gaze, thinking face and finger count in maintaining turns. Understanding of these nonverbal cues employed can help prospective intercultural communicators interact with Mandarin Chinese speakers more effectively and successfully.