Grammatical Constructions and Chinese Discourse (original) (raw)
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Dramatized Discourse: The Mandarin Chinese ba-Construction (review)
China Review International, 2009
Based on her doctoral dissertation, Jing-Schmidt has contributed the first monograph on the ba-construction to the linguistics literature in English. The book has filled a chasm in the discourse aspect of the Mandarin ba-construction, and presents a great step forward to understanding this unusual construction. Readers interested in the ba-construction or Mandarin grammar in general will enjoy the findings about one of the most studied constructions of Mandarin from this book. Chapter 1 (pp. 1-11) presents a general introduction to the orientation of the book. Emphasizing communication as the goal of language, this study has adopted a data-driven approach, using ba sentences found in textual discourse rather than decontextualized introspective sentences. To avoid the deceptive practice of viewing a syntactic structure in isolation from discourse (p. 9), examples of the ba-construction are rendered in chunk in order to have a clear discourse context. The chunk is given in Chinese characters, accompanied with free translation into English. The focus part is underscored in the bilingual chunk, and the baconstruction is then repeated with a three-lined presentation, including Chinese characters, pinyin (without tone markers), and morpheme-to-morpheme glosses. Chapter 2 (pp. 13-15) provides a sketch of the sources of data. The database for synchronic study includes three pieces of Lao She's works from the 1940s and 1950s: the first sixteen chapters of a novel, corpus S (which is the primary source of data); two modern plays, corpus W and corpus C; and a nonliterary work, corpus M, from the first eight chapters of a university textbook. The database for diachronic study consists largely of corpus Y from the Yuan dynasty, corpus J from the Ming dynasty, and corpus H from the Qing dynasty. Much of the chapter gives justification for using written literary works as data for linguistic analysis. Chapter 3 (pp. 17-66) describes the syntactic structure of the ba-construction in terms of compositional properties. Two entirely different syntactic relationships are noted (section 3.1): (i) ba-Obj-VP and (ii) ba-Subj-VP.
How Subjective Is the Subject?: A Fresh Look at Grammatical Relations in Mandarin Chinese
Journal article, 2018
This article re-examines the issue of grammatical relations in Mandarin Chinese in light of the results of recent large-scale typological research on grammatical relations (henceforth GRs) worldwide. Specifically, it discusses three syntactic operations and constructions that are cross-linguistically relevant to the definition of grammatical relations, namely relativisation, reflexivisation, and quantifier float. The study adopts a strictly language-internal typological approach and avails itself of natural linguistic data or sentences sanity-checked by native speakers. The aim of this paper is twofold: first, it explores the hypothesis that, in line with various other languages, GRs in Mandarin Chinese are construction-specific. Second, it proposes an alternative approach capable of explaining the conflicting evidence often pointed out in the literature on GRs and subjecthood in Mandarin Chinese.
Handbook of Hispanic Linguistics, 2012
In this chapter we present a perspective that places language use in discourse at the forefront of syntax. The central postulate of USAGE-BASED theory is that the basis for grammatical knowledge is speakers' linguistic experiencethe frequency and contexts of use of forms (Bybee 2010)in contradistinction to the view that language use and knowledge about language (or "performance" and "competence" cf. Chomsky 1965) are independent. These two perspectives on syntax have been broadly characterized as FUNCTIONAL (according to which grammatical structures conventionalize out of discourse patterns) and FORMAL (according to which explanations of linguistic structure are based on grammatical form, independent of function) (cf. vs. Newmeyer (1998)).
“A Course in Theoretical Chinese Grammar”: Principles and Contradictions (eng., 2013)
The paper explores the basic principles of "A Course in Theoretical Chinese Grammar" published in Russia as a schoolbook (2005, 2006). Theoretical Grammar is an obligatory course, and the challenge was to create a complete integral conceptual grammar: to show the essence of the language in its unity. And the main problem: existing courses are based on traditional approaches describing adequately the surface structures of inflectional languages, but not applicable for exploring the essence of isolative ones. Chinese syntax is primarily based on the Topic-Comment structures, and the understanding of this point may be viewed as conceptual basis of the language theory at all; Chinese morphology is "positional": lexical units may fill Positions or "fluctuate" in a Range between several part-of-speech meanings. So the publishing and use of such course may not only improve the theoretical understanding of Chinese and the Language as whole, but also enhance the quality of teaching Chinese as a comprehensive university specialty. * Corresponding name: Vladimir Kurdyumov, Tel/
The Linguistic Structure of Discourse
2005
In order to provide a principled foundation for the study of discourse, in this paper we propose answers to three basic questions: What are the atomic units of discourse? What kind of structures can be built from the elementary units? How do we interpret the resulting structures semantically? Inferences and the correct interpretation of deixis and anaphors in discourse depend upon both structural and semantic accessibility relations. Structurally, we argue, discourse is context free and accessibility is determined by the coordination and subordination relations specified by the model of discourse presented here. Semantically, accessibility is controlled by relations among a number of modal contexts (interaction, speech event, genre unit, modality, polarity, and point of view) which determine the discourse world relative to which each primitive discourse unit is interpreted. To demonstrate the validity of our approach, the linguistic discourse model developed here is applied to a problem concerning the distribution of a discourse particle in Mocho and to various problems of discourse interpretation. 1. Introduction. Over the past twenty years, discourse level phenomena have received ever increasing attention from sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists,
Grammar, Construction, and Social Action: A Study of the Qíshí Construction
Recent research by CA researchers and interactional linguists has shown that what needs to be incorporated into the analysis of discourse for its optimum further development is an orientation to social action and interaction. In this paper we explore the roles of social action in the deployment of constructions and thus in the emergence of grammar. An investigation of naturally spoken data suggests that conversations are rich in constructions, i.e. symbolically complex schematic representations of recurrent grammatical patterns. Constructions often occur in specific social action formats. In this paper we focus on specifying the social action format for a disalignment schema, the qíshí construction. We shall show that this construction is always produced in the second move of a three-part sequence and that it is usually deployed to do the following social actions: (1) to do disalignment and sometimes alignment, with the hearer's or a third party's stance; (2) to do A-event disclosing or confession; and (3) to create humorous effect. By examining how the conversation participants use various constructions to accomplish social actions, we arrive at a better understanding of how grammatical constructions emerge from social action within interaction.