Preferred Clause Structure in Mandarin Spoken and Written Discourse
نویسنده
چکیده
(1) The preferred clause structure in conversational Mandarin: i) in the form of XV, where ii) V is a verb on the lower extreme of the transitivity scale, and iii)X is a pronoun on A in low transitives, a full noun on the 0 role in high transitives, and the only argument in non-transitives Several crucial theoretical issues remain to be solved in the above definition. The fundamental issue is if there is a preferred clause structure for Mandarin in general. A more immediate question is if there is any contrast between the preferred structures of spoken and written discourse, and if the contrast can be explained. In other words, if we find the same tendencies in written discourse, Tao's "preferred clause structure of conversational Mandarin" can be expanded as the "preferred clause structure of Mandarin." If the result is opposite, it indicates that these tendencies are not characteristics of Mandarin in general; rather, they might be spoken features distinguishing spoken modes from written ones ([2], [3]). This paper thus will focus on the comparison between the preferred clause structure of spoken discourse and that of written discourse. 2. Database and Methodology Two sets of data are examined in this study: one spoken, and the other one written. The spoken data is about five minutes of daily conversation held between three female graduate students in Taiwan, and the written one comes from randomly selected seven pages (p. 107-113) of a lyric prose entitled Yanzhi Pendi 011Mkiti2l, written by (Ilan Zhen [Ettil]. Both of them are calculated in .terms of clausal units ([4]). The spoken data comprises 277 clauses, and the written, 278. Each clause is coded in terms of clause types, grammatical roles and the status of arguments. The status of arguments is either Overt) or Z(ero), leading one of the three grammatical roles: S(ubject), A(gent), and O(bject). Five clause types are introduced: high transitivity clauses (HTR), low transitivity clauses (LTR), intransitive clauses (INT), stative clauses (STA), and copular clauses (COP). All of them but two have their coding principles following Tao's [1]. The two different from Tao's are HTR and LTR clauses. For us, the original definitions of HTR and LTR are vague and make the job of classification rather difficult;
منابع مشابه
Preferred Argument Structure For Discourse Understanding
The main purpose of communication is to exchange information. Any discourse understanding model should be able to process the flow of information throughout the entire text. According to Du Bois (1987)'s studies of information flow in discourse across a number of languages, information distribution among argument positions in clauses is by no means random, but cemdn grammatical patterns tend to...
متن کاملBefore and after: sentence-internal and -external discourse relations
This study presents a corpora investigation (online available texts of written and spoken English) regarding the usage of the discourse connectives before and after in multi-sentence discourse. We focus on sentences that begin with a connective and analyse these along with the preceding text. Our results show that two discourse relations have to be derived for these sentences: a sentence-extern...
متن کاملA word- and turn-oriented approach to exploring the structure of Mandarin dialogues
This paper investigates the structure of Mandarin spoken dialogues by analysing the distribution of words and turns used in dialogues. The results of an empirical quantitative study show that independent of speakers, there exists a kind of basic vocabulary for daily Mandarin conversations. It is proposed that this is the minimal set of a lexicon for the use of spoken Mandarin. Moreover, a numbe...
متن کاملThe Effect of CMC in Business Emails in Lingua Franca: Discourse Features and Misunderstandings
The paper argues that everyday exchange of business emails produces a development in the work-group relationship, which, in turn, makes new communication styles possible and acceptable by the users' habit to computer-mediated forms, even in unbalanced professional exchanges. The focus is on the (spoken) discourse features of email messages in a self-compiled corpus of selected computer-mediated...
متن کاملClause Boundary Detection in Transcribed Spoken Language
We argue that finite clauses should be regarded as the basic unit in syntactic analysis of spoken language, and describe a method that automatically detects clause boundaries by classifying coordinating conjunctions in spoken language discourse as belonging to either the syntactic level or the discourse level of analysis. The method exploits the special role that coordinating conjunctions play ...
متن کامل