Chinese Language and Discourse - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2013

There has been a common belief that the presence of classical Chinese elements may be an important characteristic of the written style in modern Chinese. An empirical study employing the multi-feature, multi-dimensional framework for studying register variation (Biber 1988) and the statistical method of correspondence analysis confirms that there is indeed a classical dimension in modern written Chinese; but it is only one of two dimensions. The quantitative results further show that the classical dimension is not the primary dimension. The more important dimension is that of ‘literate vs. non-literate’, which has not received as much attention. The separation of the classical from the literate dimension makes it possible to account for the fact that registers having more classical Chinese elements are not necessarily more literate and vice versa. Another intriguing finding from the study is that classical Chinese elements are not monolithic; there seem to be four different types, which are distributed differently along the literate as well as the classical dimension. The difference in word length and integrability is hypothesized to account for the different types.

Mandarin Chinese zhishi (similar to English ‘only’), comprised of the adverb zhi and the copula shi, can act as an adverb (ADV) or a discourse marker (DM). This study analyzes the role of zhishi in spoken discourse, based on the methodological and theoretical principles of interactional linguistics and conversation analysis. The corpus used in this study consists of three sets of data: 1) naturally-occurring daily conversations; 2) radio/TV interviews; and 3) TV panel discussions on current political affairs. As a whole, this study reveals that the notions of restrictiveness, exclusivity, and adversativity are closely associated with ADV zhishi and DM zhishi. In addition, the present data show that since zhishi is often used to express a ‘less than expected’ feeling, it can be used to indicate mirativity (i.e. language indicating that an utterance conveys the speaker’s surprise). The data also show that the distribution of zhishi as an adverb or discourse marker depends on turn taking systems and speech situations in spoken discourse. Specifically, the ADV zhishi tends to occur in radio/TV interviews and TV panel news discussions, while the DM zhishi occurs more often in casual conversations.

Conversation Analysis (CA) has been used to reveal cultural groups with which an individual identifies him- or herself as interactants are found to practice identity group categories in discourse. In this study, a CA approach — the organisation of turn-taking in particular — was adopted to explore how a senior Chinese immigrant in Australia perceived her own identity through naturally occurring conversations with two local secondary school students, one being a non-Chinese-background English monolingual and the other a Chinese-background Cantonese-English bilingual. How the senior initiated and allocated her turns in four conversations is taken to reflect the way in which she perceived herself and her relationship with her interlocutor(s). The findings suggest that the senior’s cultural identity is not static but emerging and constructed in the conversations with her interlocutors over interactive activities. As such, this study contributes to our understanding of the nature of identity and the role of conversational interaction in negotiating cultural identities.

Previous studies based on observations of different languages have shown that phrase is the integral unit of speech formulation and articulation. Evidence from Mandarin Chinese, however, is scant. This research, therefore, sets out to explore whether the speech processing unit of Chinese spoken communication resembles that of other languages by examining its anticipatory retracing configurations in repair-related discourse. Results show that when doing repairs with the initiation strategy of speech retracing, speakers consistently return to various phrasal unit boundaries in the original utterances to restore their suspended articulations, showing that Mandarin speakers indeed organize narrative discourse on the basis of phrasal constituents. Based on the results of the present research, mental capacities of the speakers are deemed to have an impact on the syntactic scopes of anticipatory retracings in reconstructed speeches. This study thus contributes to the literature on units of speech planning from a typologically different language and raises questions about the status of the phrase in Mandarin grammar.

This paper considers how meaningful social information is conveyed with the use of sentence final particles in Macau Cantonese. The purpose in this research is to provide a general sociolinguistic account of sentence final particles in Macau Cantonese, and specifically to illustrate that social meanings of SFPs are variable, and do not constitute rigid or fixed meanings and interpretations. These social meanings, this paper argues, are a potential for indicating speaker identity at the individual level, and constitute a rich resource for communicating speaker identity in Macau Cantonese. This study uses an eclectic sociolinguistic approach, and combines elements of distributionist analyses, social network theory and constructionist approaches with a view to accounting for the dynamics underlying sentence final particle variation. Finally, this research considers constraints such as conversation topic, the affective relations between interlocutors, and gender as impinging on the distribution and use of SFPs in Macau Cantonese.