Relative Clauses in Mandarin Chinese Conversation

Na Wang

Introduction/Research area

language structure from functional and cognitive perspectives.

syntactic choices and the patterns that affect the choice of grammatical structures of relative clauses in Chinese conversation.

Introduction/Research area

Chinese Relative Clause: Relative clause is a type of complex pre-nominal adjectival modifier used in Chinese. It encodes complex adjectival modifiers that are easier to process than complex attributive structures and that are less wordy than two independent clauses.

e.g.

[Lai chi wan fan de] ke ren dai le yi da he qiao ke li.

[ come eat dinner ] guest bring a big box chocolate.

The man [who came to dinner] brought a big box of chocolate.

Information flow. It refers to that in the process of communicating, conversationalists constantly make decisions about their interlocutors’ state of knowledge, and on the basis of these decisions make lexical, grammatical, and intonational choices about how to manage the “flow” of information. (Fox & Thompson, 1990)

Aim/Justification

A number of research of RCs in English has focused on and identified how conversational structure and pragmatic factors affect and impose meaning and structure on the RC constructions.

Some study of RCs in Chinese has also attracted considerable attention from functional linguistics. Lack of naturally occurring oral conversation discourse and discussion of the actual occurrence and distribution of RCs in conversation.

This study will aim to analyze Chinese RCs in conversation from a cognitive-functional perspective, to investigate processing strategies, semantic and pragmatic factors that underlie the occurrence and distribution of such grammatical constructions.

References Fox, B. A. & Thompson, S. A. (1990). A discourse explanation of the grammar

of ralative clauses in English conversation. Language 66, 297-316.

Fox, B. A. (1987). The Noun phrase accessibility hierarchy reinterpreted: Subject primacy or the absolutie hypothesis. Language, 856-870.

Fox, B. A. & Thompson, S. A. (2007). Relative clause in English conversation: relativizers, frequency, and the notion of construction. Studies in Language 31, 293-326.

Pu, Ming-Ming. (2007). The distribution of relative clause in Chinese discourse. Discourse Processes 43, 25-53.

Chu, C. (1998). A discourse grammar of Mandarin Chinese. New York: Peter Lang.

Tao, H. (2002). Semantic and discourse properties of relative clauses in Chinese oral narratives. Contemporary Research in Modern Chinese, 4, 47-57.

Hu, C. (1998). A discourse grammar of Mandarin Chinese. New York: Peter Lang.

Chen, P. (1995). Pragmatic interpretation of structural topics and relativization in Chinese. Joural of Prgmatics, 26, 389-40.

Research Questions

1). What is the grammatical, lexical properties of RCs in Chinese conversation?

2). Does the result contribute the explanation of information flow ((discussed by Chafe 1976, 1978, Du Bois 1978, Givon 1979, 1983, 1984, and Prince 1981)

Methodology

Participants

20 native speakers of Chinese in northern China.

Data

The data come from both telephone and face-to-face conversations. Many involve just two participants, but there are some with more than two.

Methodology

Procedure

recorded naturally-occurring conversational data and transcribe those conversations.

cull relative clauses from the data.

identifying and categorizing varying relative clauses

Analyzing the patterns of RCs in distribution in the data.

Data analysis

Quantitative Analysis Table data comparison

Expected Finding

the use of RCs in Chinese conversation follows patterns that are sensitive to a range of pragmatic and prosodic factors.

the regularities underlying these patterns can provide a organization of RC in the heads of Chinese speakers.

Limitation of the study

All of the participants are from Beijing in China

Size of the corpus. (15 participants.)