Chinese Language and Discourse - Volume 8, Issue 2, 2017

Abstract

Interrogative pronouns such as what in English, shenme in Mandarin Chinese, and mwe/mwusun in Korean all have developed extended uses beyond interrogation. Such uses may include filling a gap in conversation, softening a speaker’s epistemic stance, and indicating strong emotions such as surprises or incredulity. Yet there is little research dealing with crosslinguistic patterns with large corpora of interactive discourse data. In this paper, we investigate the extended uses based on corpora of multiple telephone calls from the three languages. We show that eight categories of extended use can be identified in the corpora and that most of the extended uses tend to fall in the negative territory. We provide a pragmatic interactive account for this phenomenon and hope that the taxonomy and coding scheme developed here can serve as a starting point for future crosslinguistic and corpus-based comparative studies of what-like tokens as well as of the discourse pragmatic uses of other interrogative forms.

Abstract

This paper investigates the most frequent lexical bundle (LB) ka li kong (to-you-say) (KLK), in an 18.5-hour Taiwanese Southern Min conversation corpus. The analysis focuses on the discourse-pragmatic functions of KLK, the role it plays in the speaker’s management of information in talk-in-interaction, and the collocations that are employed. The results show that the speaker utilizes KLK to imply epistemic authority regarding the veracity of the predication. Meanwhile, it expresses the speaker’s stance or functions as a discourse organizer to initiate a narrative that is newsworthy. Prosodically, it is always processed as a holistic chunk with great phonological reduction. Along with the low transitivity of the verb kong demonstrated by the type of object it takes, we argue that KLK is developing into a discourse marker. Collocation of KLK with the marker toh further triggers the grammaticalization of the four-word bundle toh ka li kong (TKLK) to encode an extreme stance.

Abstract

Comparisons of Chinese adverbs hai and zai is a long-standing topic in Chinese linguistics. Previous studies tend to mix up different uses of hai and zai, often leading to unnecessary confusion. This study focuses on the repetition use of these two adverbs, and demonstrates that in two syntactic environments – sentences with and without quantitative phrases – the nuances between hai and zai can both be captured by the hypothesis that “[+increasing]” is more essential for zai to deliver the repetition reading while “[+similar]” is more essential for hai to deliver the same reading. Based on conceptual correlations shared cross-linguistically, it is argued that the “[+similar]” feature facilitates the shift from the notion “inverted-sequence” to the notion “repetition” whereas the “[+increasing]” feature serves as an indispensable link between the notion “increment” and the notion “repetition”. Therefore, for the notion “repetition”, it is widely seen that a variety of languages use two devices to code it, one emphasizing the “[+similar]” feature and the other emphasizing the “[+increasing]” feature, and Chinese hai and zai is just one of such cases. In this way, the cross-linguistic perspective is proved to offer insights to explorations on language-specific issues as it provides accounts that are deep-rooted in the conceptual level.

Abstract

In the eyes of early modern European scholars, Chinese was commonly regarded as a “lacking” language: lacking its own grammatical tradition or “grammatics”; lacking the complex morphology of the classical European languages; even lacking its own “parts of speech” or word classes. In the late 19th century Ma Jianzhong created a grammatics for Chinese by adapting the categories of Latin grammar - and with a good understanding of the similarities and differences between the two languages - but the Chinese grammarians who followed him have struggled with the question of what might be common to all languages and what might be distinctive to Chinese. Ma saw a Chinese grammatics as a way to fill a gap in the country's literacy education, and this applied focus has been shared by most Chinese grammarians since, something which has tended to put restrictions on their description and theorising. A historical perspective is thus absolutely essential for understanding the practical and ideological problems Chinese grammatics continues to face, and can also throw light on the general challenge of extending “European grammar” to non-European languages.

This article reviews Commemorative Essays for Professor Yuen Ren Chao: Father of Modern Chinese Linguistics978-986-147-738-1

This article reviews Cross-linguistic Influence in Multilinguals: An Examination of Chinese-English-French Speakers by Wai Lan Tsang978-1-78309-688-6

This article reviews Explorations into Chinese as a Second Language by Istvan Kecskes978-3-319-54026-9