Chinese Language and Discourse - Current Issue

le is the mostly widely studied aspect marker in Chinese. In addition to perfective aspect marker to indicate action completion, le can also serve as a sentence-final particle to indicate a currently relevant state. This study investigates how Chinese native speakers use le in oral discourse and the factors that influence their use. The data were collected from three discourses including informal conversations, elicited narratives, and teacher classroom speech. Multivariate analysis of 2,359 tokens revealed that verb complement type and verb type have the strongest effects, followed by le position, serial verb relationship, sentence type, discourse context, and time word presence/absence.

This paper explores the functions of Chinese final particle ou in both TCU-final and non-TCU-final positions in medical advice-giving. Using Praat, we differentiated phonologically marked and unmarked ou and analyzed their functions in both doctor and patient speech. The findings suggest a difference in participants’ use of ou: while non-TCU-final ou occurs mainly in the patient speech to mark newsworthiness and call for the doctor’s attention, TCU-final ou occurs in both the doctor and the patient speech serving various functions. Most importantly, the paper provides a new understanding of the various functions of ou as interconnected to each other under its intrinsic discreet quality that facilitates relationship building in the selected conversational activity.

Indefinite subjects in Mandarin Chinese are dis-preferred or restricted according to previous studies although they do exist in natural data. In this study we examine two issues: when they are used and why they are used. The first issue is best answered by looking at the information status of indefinite subjects. We adopt the framework of givenness and newness developed by Prince (1992) and revised by Birner’s (2004, 2006). We find that although indefinite subjects are new most of the time, most of them also carry some old information; the given-before-new principle is satisfied. For the second issue, we examine topic continuity of indefinite subjects in discourse. We find that they perform a discourse function different from that of the post-verbal NPs in existential sentences. Most of the time their referents are non-persistent, and they are not discourse topics, unlike post-verbal NPs in existential sentences.

This study analyzes the manual action verb dǎ as part of the [dǎ – NP] construction in two Chinese corpora. Drawing on constructionist perspectives on language productivity (Goldberg 2006; Gries 2012), I show that [dǎ – NP] is a productive construction the multiple meanings of which are conceptually motivated by manual action. The type-token distributions show the productivity of the [dǎ – NP] schema, and the semantic clusters in a network of meanings show a gradation of manual action experiences with no clear-cut conceptual boundaries. Usage productivity goes hand in hand with semantic extension, which gives rise to the emergence of the light verb dǎ. Contra previous morpheme-based studies that view dǎ as a polysemy in its own right, isolated from its network of collocates, I argue that polysemy is a consequence and an epiphenomenon of constructional productivity resulting from language use and exemplar propagation.

This study investigates metaphors used in mergers and acquisitions texts in a Chinese financial newspaper, The 21st Century Business Herald. Based on corpus data, we approach the rhetorical motive and persuasive power hidden behind metaphors from the perspective of rhetorical criticism. The study found four major metaphors: war, marriage, struggle and hunting, and game, in the financial texts about mergers and acquisitions. The war metaphor is the most common variety, followed by the marriage metaphor, suggesting the role of power perception and gender perception in the representation of financial affairs.

This study examines the language choices among four- to six-year old Chinese-Indonesian children in various social domains to identify patterns of choice and analyze sociocultural factors that significantly affect their language choices. The results show that Chinese-Indonesian children’s language choice is highly patterned based on the type of social domains and interlocutors. Their choices are influenced by three major factors: (1) language attitude including parental attitude and the attitude of the indigenous population; (2) language habit formed at home; (3) social domain and context of communication.