Verbal engagement in doctor–patient interaction: Resonance in Western and Traditional Chinese Medicine

This study provides a framework for assessing doctors' verbal engagement during medical consultations. It quantifies doctors' degrees of resonance (Du Bois, 2014), a form of interactional alignment (Pickering and Garrod, 2021) that occurs when speakers imitate and re-use words and constructions uttered by their interlocutors. Resonance often involves creativity and active participation in others’ speech, overtly signalling that what they said is relevant for continuing the interaction (Tantucci and Wang, 2021). We looked at Chinese naturalistic consultations and explored whether resonance produced by Chinese doctors with a background in Western medicine (WM) differs from Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) doctors. Our data includes 60 online medical consultations and shows that TCM doctors’ resonance is remarkably higher. This reflected stronger involvement in patients’ speech in combination with other interactional indicators of engagement such as sentence peripheral markers of intersubjectivity (Tantucci, 2021) and strategies of relevance acknowledgement (Tantucci, 2023). The pragmatics of TCM doctors is also characterised by a more directive language geared towards a healthy lifestyle, whereas WM doctors favour etiological assessment, with a predominant use of assertive speech acts

From immediate to extended intersubjectification:a gradient approach to intersubjective awareness and semasiological change

This paper provides a theoretical and methodological contribution to the heated debate on intersubjectivity and intersubjectification (Nuyts, 2001, 2012; Traugott & Dasher, 2002; Traugott, 2003, 2010, 2012; Verhagen, 2005; Narrog, 2010, 2012; Dancygier & Sweetser, 2012). I will argue that intersubjectivity, intended as a subject’s awareness of the other persona(s)’ feelings, knowledge, and beliefs, can be construed alternatively on an ‘immediate’ and on an ‘extended’ level. Immediate intersubjectivity (I-I) corresponds to the mutual awareness of the speech participants during the ongoing speech event, whereas extended intersubjectivity (E-I) includes an assumed third party (specific or generic) who has an indirect social bearing on the utterance (cf. Tantucci 2013, 2014). Along a unidirectional cline of change, extended intersubjectification constitutes a further stage of semantic and/or grammatical reanalysis with respect to its immediate counterpart. In order to empirically justify the diachronic continuum between the two, I provide some corpus-illustrated (cf. Tummers et al., 2005, p. 235) examples from Mandarin and corpus-based evidence about the constructions [you don’t want X] and believe it or not in American English

Multimodal Resources in Turn-Taking in Semi-Institutional Mandarin Multiparty Interactions

This study investigates the utilization of multimodal resources in organizing turn-taking during multiparty interactions in a Mandarin talk show. By applying multimodal conversation analysis and interactional linguistics to 5.8 hours of impromptu talk show data, the study reveals that the chair and the other participants orient to their dual roles, both institutional and real-life, to configure a semi-institutional setting. Besides, the multimodal resources can be effectively used by the participants, i.e., the host and the guests, to manage contingencies during turn-taking, including visible cues, embodied movements, and pragmatic (in)completion. The findings contribute to our understanding of the dynamics of turn-taking in semi-institutional settings and shed light on the interplay of multimodal resources in larger group conversations. The research expands the existing literature on multiparty institutional conversations in Mandarin

Typological parameters of genericity

Different languages employ different morphosyntactic devices for expressing genericity. And, of course, they also make use of different morphosyntactic and semantic or pragmatic cues which may contribute to the interpretation of a sentence as generic rather than episodic. [...] We will advance the strong hypo thesis that it is a fundamental property of lexical elements in natural language that they are neutral with respect to different modes of reference or non-reference. That is, we reject the idea that a certain use of a lexical element, e.g. a use which allows reference to particular spatio-temporally bounded objects in the world, should be linguistically prior to all other possible uses, e.g. to generic and non-specific uses. From this it follows that we do not consider generic uses as derived from non-generic uses as it is occasionally assumed in the literature. Rather, we regard these two possibilities of use as equivalent alternative uses of lexical elements. The typological differences to be noted therefore concern the formal and semantic relationship of generic and non-generic uses to each other; they do not pertain to the question of whether lexical elements are predetermined for one of these two uses. Even supposing we found a language where generic uses are always zero-marked and identical to lexical sterns, we would still not assume that lexical elements in this language primarily have a generic use from which the non-generic uses are derived. (Incidentally, none of the languages examined, not even Vietnamese, meets this criterion.

Chinese DE constructions in secondary predication: Historical and typological perspectives

This dissertation investigates the history of Chinese DE [tə] constructions in light of the typology of secondary predication. A secondary predicate, such as hot in He drank the tea hot, is a predicate that provides subsidiary information to a substructure (the participant tea) of the more salient primary event (drank). Mandarin DE features in two strategies: (i) a DE-marked primary event elaborated by a predicate following it, and (ii) a DE-marked secondary predicate preposed to the primary predicate. Focusing on Late Medieval Chinese (7th to mid-13th c.), the study examines the evolution of the DE-marked strategies from three distinctive constructions: resultative [V DE1 VP] by DE1 (得), nominal modification by DE2 (底/的), and secondary predication by DE3 (地). The first theme concerns the interactions between DE2-marked nominalization and DE3-marked secondary predicate constructions. Results show that DE2 and DE3 developed from opposite poles of the attribution vs. predication continuum, overlapping in categories intermediate between prototypical restrictive modification and secondary predication. Their distinctive information-packaging functions are consistently mapped to different construals of a property’s time-stability, which are reflected in their collocational preferences. The second theme of the study deals with the merger of DE1 and DE2 constructions and the creation of the [V DE Pred] topic-comment schema, where [V DE] represents an event as the topic, and Pred makes an assertion about a substructure of V. The discussion focuses on the structural and semantic changes of the [V DE1 VP] construction that facilitate its alignment with the DE2-marked topic-comment construction. The development of DE constructions mirrors semantic shifts between temporally anterior vs. simultaneous relations and conceptual fluidity between event- vs. participant-orientation, parameters that feature in the encoding of secondary predication crosslinguistically (Verkerk 2009, Himmelmann and Schultze-Berndt 2005, van der Auwera and Malchukov 2005, Loeb-Diehl 2005). The findings also suggest a reevaluation of the typology. Notably, semantic orientation is not crucial to whether a semantic relation is encoded by a DE construction, or which DE construction is selected. Instead, it is information-packaging functions, construals of time-stability, and iconic principles that play a dominant role

Choosing between zero and pronominal subject: modeling subject expresion in the 1st person singular in Finnish conversation

The variability of subject expression has been extensively investigatedacross languages. We present a large-scale multivariate statistical analysis of thechoice of subject expression in the 1st person singular in spontaneous Finnishconversation, with a focus on the choice between pronominal and zero subject.Spoken Finnish represents an interesting case, as the dominant type of subjectexpression is double marking, i. e. the combination of a pronominal subjectmarker (subject pronoun) and a verbal subject marker (person marking).Siewierska (1999, From anaphoric pronoun to grammatical agreement marker:Why objects don’t make it. Folia Linguistica 33(2). 225–251) notes that this type ofmarking is typologically rare. Our findings indicate that the choice of subjectexpression is affected by both constructional and cognitive/discourse factors,and that an important role in the choice of subject expression is played by thesequential structure of the conversation.</p

The Antonym Construction: A Comparison between English and Mandarin

All languages have antonym pairs but may differ in the ways of using them. The use of antonymy in the form of antonym co-occurrence has been examined and compared between English and Mandarin with the conclusion that antonym pairs could co-occur on lexical level in Mandarin but not in English. That might be refuted with the identification of the antonym co-occurrence on lexical level in English like frenemy (friend-enemy) and humblebrag. Therefore, this study identified and collected the items of antonym co-occurrence on lexical level from in-use English and Mandarin to examine and compare within the framework of Construction Grammar. The collected items were curated for antonymy consistency and the status of being lexicalized. The final sample included 105 English and 161 Mandarin antonym constructs. The two collections were examined and compared from the perspectives of form-meaning schema, headedness, syntactic categories, and inheritance links. In addition to the typological differences between English and Mandarin, the observation demonstrates that the antonym constructions in both languages make use of the unity and contrast inherent in antonymy to communicate the meanings more than a binary contrast. Both can be nominalized or adverbialized, have the property of neutralized headedness, and are a complex of multi-inheritance links across lexical and phrasal levels. Construction Grammar proves effective in facilitating this original joint analysis of the English and the Mandarin antonym constructions. Such effectiveness is credited to observing the antonym constructs as a form-meaning pair in use. Construction is thus proposed as a parameter in future contrastive studies. With the universality of the understanding and use of antonymy on lexical level confirmed between English and Mandarin, further research including more languages will be worthwhile in verifying such cognitive and linguistic universal

Corpus based study of the diachronic development of [V ge X] in Chinese: a construction grammar account

This thesis applies the construction grammar framework to a corpus-based study of the development of post-verbal ge in Chinese. Ge in Mandarin Chinese is widely considered as a general classifier (Li and Thompson 1981, Zhu 1982, Lü 1984). As a classifier, the main function of ge is to categorize the entity denoted by the following noun and enable numeral attachment. Thus, ge is typically preceded by numerals and followed by referential nouns. In a post-verbal position, when the numeral before ge is yi ‘one’, the numeral tends to be omitted. The ‘bare ge’ in post-verbal position is found co-occurring with non-referential nouns and non-nominal elements, such as predicative adjectives and verb phrases. The function of the post-verbal ge with these atypical collocations has attracted much attention in Chinese linguistic research (Zhang, 2003; Lü, 1984; Biq, 2004). One of the features of the previous research is that the researchers focus on a sub-set of post-verbal ge variations and try to provide a generalized claim about all instances of post-verbal ge used in Mandarin. Another feature is that the research focus is on ge alone and little attention has been paid to its co-texts and contexts of use. In addition, very little work has been done on the emergence of the mysterious function of post-verbal ge or the internal links between ge as a classifier and this new function. The main task of this thesis is to identify the semantic and syntactic properties of the post-verbal ge with atypical collocations and to explore how ge developed these properties in the post-verbal position. Within a construction grammar framework, the post-verbal ge with this special function and its co-texts are identified as a construction with a telic and bounded aspectual meaning. This [V ge X] construction of telic and bounded aspectual meaning is different from the classifier construction in terms of morpho-syntactic features as well as semantic and pragmatic properties. With the constructional approach, this research shows that the unit to which changes apply is not ge alone but the [V ge X] construction and the morpho-syntactic and semantic relations between these three elements have changed over time. Furthermore, the investigation into the mechanism of these changes also reveals that the development of micro-constructions of the [V ge X] construction of telic and bounded aspectual meaning occurred in a constructional network, which links different constructions with the [V ge X] schema

Principles of event framing : genetic stability in grammar and discourse

Ever since Wilhelm von Humboldt’s (1836) pioneering study of Nahuatl, linguists have recurrently recognized that languages differ fundamentally in the syntactic weight they attribute to noun-phrases as the arguments of a verb. Currently, the most prominent attempts to turn this intuition into a precise hypothesis revolve around the notion of ‘configurationality’