The modal particle ma 嘛: theoretical frames, analysis and interpretive perspectives

This article sets out to provide a semantic and pragmatic account of the modal particle ma 嘛, endeavouring to put into light new aspects in its function which, at present, remain widely unexplored in the literature. It presents an analysis of the particle ma by interrogating a written and a spoken corpus, showing how the semantic and the pragmatic levels are tightly interweaved in the functioning of ma: the results supported my hypothesis that the particle is plausibly a marker of interpersonal evidentiality (IE), a category set up by Tantucci (2013), used to signal a socially acknowledged piece of information, playing a fundamental role in the expression of politeness by safeguarding the interlocutors’ face; consequently, ma is always used with information that has an active or accessible status in the interlocutors’ mind and that is always pragmatically salient, independently of its position (at the end or inside the sentence), marking a Topic or a Focus. The particle performs pragmatic functions close to the ones of discourse markers since it increases the relevance of the marked information to the context, therefore also playing a contributing role in the coherence of discourse

CONFORMITY TOWARDS LOCAL WISDOM AMONG THE SAME INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE SPEAKERS

Speakers of same indigenous language usually share the same values and norms among them. This phenomenon can be searched in Indonesian Chinese society, who is divided in several groups based on their indigenous languages. They try to act and adjust their beliefs and behaviors to the group’s norms and values. The need to conform occurs in order to be accepted by the group. The norms and values, as unsaid rules and attitudes which have been conformed, are considered as the way to support the local wisdom.This paper will focus on the conformity among Indonesian Chinese society, who speak in their own indigenous languages and its roles in supporting their local wisdom

Mandarin Chinese modality exclusivity norms

Modality exclusivity norms have been developed in different languages for research on the relationship between perceptual and conceptual systems. This paper sets up the first modality exclusivity norms for Chinese, a Sino-Tibetan language with semantics as its orthographically relevant level. The norms are collected through two studies based on Chinese sensory words. The experimental designs take into consideration the morpho-lexical and orthographic structures of Chinese. Study 1 provides a set of norms for Mandarin Chinese single-morpheme words in mean ratings of the extent to which a word is experienced through the five sense modalities. The degrees of modality exclusivity are also provided. The collected norms are further analyzed to examine how sub-lexical orthographic representations of sense modalities in Chinese characters affect speakers’ interpretation of the sensory words. In particular, we found higher modality exclusivity rating for the sense modality explicitly represented by a semantic radical component, as well as higher auditory dominant modality rating for characters with transparent phonetic symbol components. Study 2 presents the mean ratings and modality exclusivity of coordinate disyllabic compounds involving multiple sense modalities. These studies open new perspectives in the study of modality exclusivity. First, links between modality exclusivity and writing systems have been established which has strengthened previous accounts of the influence of orthography in the processing of visual information in reading. Second, a new set of modality exclusivity norms of compounds is proposed to show the competition of influence on modality exclusivity from different linguistic factors and potentially allow such norms to be linked to studies on synesthesia and semantic transparency

Corpus-Based Research on Chinese Language and Linguistics

This volume collects papers presenting corpus-based research on Chinese language and linguistics, from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. The contributions cover different fields of linguistics, including syntax and pragmatics, semantics, morphology and the lexicon, sociolinguistics, and corpus building. There is now considerable emphasis on the reliability of linguistic data: the studies presented here are all grounded in the tenet that corpora, intended as collections of naturally occurring texts produced by a variety of speakers/writers, provide a more robust, statistically significant foundation for linguistic analysis. The volume explores not only the potential of using corpora as tools allowing access to authentic language material, but also the challenges involved in corpus interrogation, analysis, and building

ANTONYMS? PRESUPPOSITIONS? ON THE SEMANTICS OF TWO EVALUATIVE MODALS JINGRAN AND GUORAN IN MANDARIN

Jingran indicates that the (non)occurrence of a situation that it presents contradicts the expectation, while guoran indicates that the (non)occurrence of a situation presented by it converges with the expectation. Arguing against Hsieh's (2005, 2006a, 2006b) proposal that evaluative modals in Mandarin do not have a model-theoretic semantics, I propose that, given that the expectation serves as a modal base B which an evaluative conversational background forms, jingran presents a proposition which represents a simple necessity of negation in a possible world w with respect to B, whereas guoran presents a proposition which is equivalent to a simple necessity in a possible world w with respect to B. Contrary to Hsieh's claim that modality in Mandarin has a language-specific property, i.e., that the semantics of certain modals in Mandarin cannot be defined in terms of possibility and necessity, I seek to fit modality in Mandarin into a bigger picture of modality in general and show that it is possible to achieve a universally valid notional category of modality, similar to the works of Kratzer (1981), though different languages may have language-specific choices for modal bases, which result in different types of modality in languages

The epistemic use of yào in Mandarin Chinese and its theoretical implications

The epistemic use of the Mandarin Chinese modal yào comes with typologically interesting properties. In this paper, the distribution and meaning of the epistemic use of yào will be described first. This use of yào is restricted to certain explicit strict comparative constructions, but forbidden in many other degree and non-degree constructions. Second, epistemic yào cannot appear above or below negation. Third, epistemic yào has a quantificational force stronger than that of existential modals, yet weaker than that of strong necessity modals. In the theoretical component of the paper, I argue that epistemic yào is a modifier for strict comparative morphemes, a syntactic/semantic function that sets it apart from many other epistemic modals that take propositions as direct argument. The weak necessity quantificational force of epistemic yào is encoded in its semantics by making recourse to alternative modal bases. Epistemic yào's inability to form scopal relation with negation arises from two factors: (i) its status as a strict comparative morpheme modifier, and (ii) competition between lexical items with identical semantics. Through investigating the epistemic use of yào, some hitherto unnoticed interesting modal properties in natural language are brought to the forefront, and new intra- and inter-linguistic variations in the distribution and meaning of modals are revealed

Metadiscourse repertoire of L1 Mandarin undergraduates writing in English : a cross-contextual, cross-disciplinary study

This article presents a qualitative, comparative study of metadiscourse in the academic writing of two groups of undergraduate students working in two different disciplines. The groups of students were: 1) Native speakers of Mandarin studying in China through the medium of English; 2) Native speakers of Mandarin studying in the UK through the medium of English. For each group of students, we examined writing undertaken in two undergraduate disciplinary courses: Literary Criticism and Translation Studies. Our aim was to extend research into English writing by L1 Mandarin speakers, and to identify patterns of difference and similarity both between educational contexts and between disciplines. Results suggest that patterns of metadiscourse use in our corpus are associated with both disciplinary and contextual factors, but that contextual factors may have a stronger effect than disciplinary factors. For our data, local institutional culture seems to have a noticeable influence on student writers' use of metadiscourse