Chinese Language and Discourse - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2014

Previous studies of the Chinese nominal marker de 的 attempted to explain its optionality in ways that have fallen short in providing a full account. In this paper, a comprehensive nominal continuum is hypothesized with proper nouns and common nouns prohibiting the use of an internal de at one end. In the middle of the continuum, depending on the degree of lexicalization, there are compounds that may have word-like (no de option) or phrase-like (with de option) properties. At the other end are noun phrases that have individual member, or members, of a type/set readings. The more a compound is lexicalized into a word, the less likely de can occur in front of its determinatum. Whereas the use of 我的爸爸 “my dad” is more likely in a title for its thematic importance, the use of 我爸爸 “my dad” is found tied to its uniqueness in a discourse context.

Transitivity has been approached from various discourse functional points of view. In this paper, we describe the emergence in standard Chinese of a marker of high transitivity, 到 dao ‘reach’, in syntactic contexts where it has not been attested before (e.g., 帮助到你 bangzhu dao ni ‘help you’). We argue that this emergence is associated with a number of factors: the semantic properties of the main verb, dialectal influences, and recent social trends towards consumerism and an emergent “yuppie” identity in contemporary Chinese urban life. We take the innovative uses of dao to be an instance of linguistic structure co-evolving with societal change.

This paper presents a corpus-based analysis of the nature of spontaneous storytelling activity in daily conversation. Based on both the structural and interactional views of oral narrative, we propose to add another perspective, arguing that conversational storytelling is a three-dimensional construct, with narrative, interactive and cognitive functions performed simultaneously in the context of social communication. The study has recorded 15 pieces of casual talks by 11 adult native speakers of Chinese and extracted 87 stories altogether. From the data, we observe that in the process of conversational narratives, (1) narration is achieved interactively, with the narrative sequence, story structure and even tellership all framed by communicative needs; (2) interactional activities, such as self-image building, interpersonal work and social-cultural practice are engaged in; (3) intersubjective social cognition is also achieved as personal experience becomes shared and cooperatively interpreted.

This study compared and analysed the classifier usage in two cohorts: the 492 Cantonese-speaking young children tested in 1995 (Tse & Li, 2011), and the 143 children tested in 2010 (Li &Tse, 2011). The results indicated that: (1) the 1995 and 2010 cohorts shared the same 8 most commonly used classifiers, 個 go3, 隻 zek3, 架 gaa3, 杯 bui1, 把 baa2, 嚿 gau6, 張 zoeng1, 間 gaan1; (2) Two top 10 classifiers were found in the 2010 cohort: 支 zi1, and 部 bou6; (3) both cohorts overused the general classifier 個 go3; and (4) both cohorts overused 隻 zek3 and 嚿 gau6 to replace sortal classifiers and even to replace the general classifier 個 go3. The pragmatic features and the associated social changes were discussed to understand the minor changes in classifier use between 1995 and 2010 cohorts.