Chinese Language and Discourse - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2016

Yidian (一点, a little) in Chinese is commonly considered an indefinite and under-specific quantifier. This study provides some rethinking of yidian through the lens of elasticity theory, based on real-life data from TV discussions. Elasticity theory offers new insights on the study of yidian, arguing that yidian is both an elastic quantifier and a qualifier. The findings show that while yidian indicates a small quantity and lesser degree, it is elastic and functions multi-dimensionally from mitigating to boosting. The frequency distributions of three pragmatic functions (just-right which is unmarked, mitigating and boosting which are marked) suggest that yidian is used more for informational than interpersonal and political purposes. In a positive utterance yidian tends to be a mitigator, but in negation it is a booster. The manifestation of elasticity is in yidian’s fluidity, stretchability and strategy, enabling it to stretch to suit various contexts and making it a powerful ‘little’ word that performs a ‘big’ role in communication.

This study analyzes adverbial margins as a functional category in Chinese and, through the analysis, elucidates a graded distinction between subordination and coordination. Adverbial margins, which describe circumstances of situations in sentence nuclei, involve a varying of structural devices, including connectives, nominal forms, aspectually marked verbs, negation, and modality adverbs. The margin-nucleus pairs show varied degrees of subordination. This study takes an initial step towards substantiating and quantifying the gradient distinction. A mechanism of five parameters is proposed to rank margin-nucleus pairs in terms of tightness in clause linkage and subordination. The study contributes to the functional analysis of Chinese and the cross-linguistic discussions of the typology of subordination and coordination.

This paper is based on an investigation of the Five Phases (五行, wuxing) in traditional Chinese thought within a cognitive linguistic framework. In analyzing three of the five concepts in the wuxing scheme, namely WOOD (木, mu), EARTH (土, tu) and METAL (金, jin), as recorded in ancient and modern Chinese, we attempt to find out (1) the conceptual metonymies and metaphors they have developed, (2) the similarities and differences between the three concepts in ancient and modern Chinese, and (3) the possible reasons for those similarities and differences and the implications they have for ancient and modern Chinese ways of cognizing the world. Our comparative analysis shows that while the semantic networks of the three concepts remain largely consistent from ancient to modern Chinese, those conceptual metaphors which are closely tied to the wuxing scheme are much less active in modern Chinese. On the whole it can be claimed that the ancient Chinese believed in the unity of Heaven and human and constructed the world based on three fundamental conceptual metaphors: “nature operates in accordance with WUXING”, “THE HUMAN BODY OPERATES IN ACCORDANCE WITH WUXING” and “SOCIETY OPERATES IN ACCORDANCE WITH WUXING”. Yet it seems that this belief in the unity of Heaven and human has weakened in the modern Chinese mind and modern Chinese people no longer rely on the wuxing scheme to understand the world.

This article examines how and why participants in conversation modify the reported speech made by another speaker, and proffer a second saying in subsequent talk. Two types of modified reportings are identified: (1) explicit modifications, and (2) implicit modifications. Both types are shown to treat the first reported speech as inadequate, and lay claim to speaker’s epistemic authority or priority over the reported talk vis-a-vis other interlocutors. Further, explicit modifications of a prior report generally display a stronger epistemic stance than implicit modifications.

In the study of language learning, researchers sometimes ask how languages in contact are related. They compare the linguistic features of the languages, how the mental grammars of each language sub-system are represented, put to use in performance, and how they interact. Within a linguistic family, languages can be closely related or distantly related, an interesting factor, for example, in understanding bilingualism and second language development. Dialects, on the other hand, are considered to be variants of the same language. While there is no way to always draw a sharp line between the categories of language and dialect, it is necessary to distinguish between the two kinds of language variation by the application of uniform criteria. The distinction between dialect and language is important for designing bilingual instructional programs, both for students who already speak two languages and for beginning second language learners.