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

The present study investigates whether and to what extent motion-event gestures compensate for the omission of linguistic expression in Chinese discourse and across different languages to understand language-specificity/language-universality and the coordination of motion information across the two modalities. The Chinese conversational and narrative data consistently show that manner fog (i.e., manner absent from speech but present in gesture) was not found. Chinese speakers also demonstrate a preference for compensation — gestures tend to compensate for the lack of path content in speaking. These results differ from those for English and Turkish which do not prefer path gestures in manner-only clauses. The cross-linguistic variation provides evidence for language specificity in gestural compensation. The language-specific coordination of information in speech and gesture suggests Chinese speakers’ habitual focus of attention on PATH in multimodal communication.

The present study investigates the lexicalization of zhenshi and shizaishi in Taiwan Mandarin, showing how they originate as a fusion of an adverb and the copula/focus marker shi and further develop a non-compositional meaning through talk-in-interaction and function as right peripheral stance markers in speech. Many instances of the copula/focus marker shi in Modern Mandarin have become a word-internal element and merged with an adverb/conjunction to form an X-shi construction semantically similar to the original X. Our targets, zhenshi and shizaishi, are instantiations of this morphological trend. However, through sequence truncation and metonymic inference, the two morphological fusion cases further demonstrate lexicalization as they respectively acquire an evaluative meaning. Our study thus illustrates the emergent nature of grammar/lexicon arising from the interaction among language (syntagmatic co-occurrence), culture (communicative politeness), and cognition (pragmatic inference).

This study examines the variation between the active and the bei passive in Mandarin Chinese from a probabilistic perspective. The variables considered include discourse continuity factors and adversity. Two different models were built for the active-agentless passive variation and the active-agentive passive variation. Four factors were found to have significant effect: agent thematicity, patient thematicity, adversity, and referential distance. In contrast, the effect of topic persistence and local environment is not significant. The accuracy of prediction for the active-agentless passive variation is significantly higher than the accuracy for the active-agentive passive variation. Overall, the bei passive, either agentless or agentive, is more likely to be chosen over its active counterpart, if it is adversative, has a non-thematic agent, a thematic patient, and a shorter referential distance for the patient.

We address the issue of poetic discourse in classical Chinese poetry and propose the use of imageries as characteristic anchors that stylistically differentiate poetic schools as well as individual poets. We describe an experiment that is aimed at the use of ontological knowledge to identify patterns of imagery use as stylistic features of classical Chinese poetry for authorship attribution of classical Chinese poems. This work is motivated by the understanding that the creative language use by different poets can be characterised through their creative use of imageries which can be captured through ontological annotation. A corpus of lyric songs written by Liu Yong and Su Shi in the Song Dynasty is used, which is word segmented and ontologically annotated. State-of-the-art techniques in automatic text classification are adopted and machine learning methods applied to evaluate the performance of the imagery-based features. Empirical results show that word tokens alone can be used to achieve an accuracy of 87% in the task of authorship attribution between Liu Yong and Su Shi. More interestingly, ontological knowledge is shown to produce significant performance gains when combined with word tokens. This observation is reinforced by the fact that most of the feature sets with ontological annotation outperform the use of bare word tokens as features. Our empirical evidence strongly suggests that the use of imageries is a powerful indicator of poetic discourse that is characteristic of the two poets concerned in the study.

Some linguists have argued that sentence-final particles (SFPs) are only meaningful in relation to the content of the discourse. This is of course an empirical matter subject to investigation. Adopting a working hypothesis that SFPs have core meanings independent of the discourse context, this paper proposes definitions for two evidential SFPs in Cantonese with related meanings: lo1 and aa1maa3. The method for developing the SFPs’ definitions is adopted (with modifications) from Besemeres and Wierzbicka’s (2003) proposal for defining “discourse markers.” Corpus-based examples and constructed minimal-pair dialogues are used to demonstrate that the definitions succeed at accounting for all the contexts that allow one, the other, both, or neither of the SFPs to be used based on acceptability judgments from native-Cantonese speakers. In addition to furthering our understanding of the two SFPs under discussion, this paper provides empirical evidence in support of the idea that discourse particles have context-independent meanings.