Inter-lingual Homophony: Neige as a Demonstrative/Filler in Mandarin Chinese

The demonstrative/filler neige in Mandarin Chinese is potentially contentious outside that language,as it bears resemblance in terms of pronunciation with a racial slur in English. Nonetheless, neigedoes not possess any racist connotation in Mandarin Chinese, and its analysis needs to take intoconsideration historical and contextual information. The form neige is a colloquialism of its formalequivalent nage, which has functioned as a demonstrative determiner/pronoun or a discoursemarker in verbal communication since ancient periods. The derivation of nei from na is realisedvia suppression of the demonstrative with the numeral yi ‘one’, and this phenomenon occurredeven before Mandarin was invented as a national lingua franca. Differently from languages suchas English in which the number of homophones is limited, Chinese contains an enormous amountof syllables with myriads of homophones, owing to the fact that Chinese is a tone language thatdepends on tone implications to differentiate meanings and syllables/words are hence predominantlymono- or bi-morphemic. As a consequence, homophones pertaining to Chinese aboundboth language-internally and cross-linguistically. Among the repercussions of homophony are theliterary inquisitions during the Qing era that sabotaged freedom of creation. Therefore, the interpretationand comprehension of neige need to be objective and impartial

‘Farming Writing’: An Innovative Subgenre of Internet Literature

As an innovative subgenre of Internet literature, ‘farming writing’ has attained popularity in contemporary China’s cyberspace, which, in a narrow sense, denotes narratives pertaining to agronomic theories and agrarian practices. Disparate from cliché-ridden web romances that deploy authorial ‘golden finger’ to equip protagonists with impeccable demeanour and prowess, ‘farming’ fiction is characterised by reality-oriented, detail-enriched depictions, notwithstanding its essence as ‘feel-good writing’. Furthermore, ‘farming’ works are marked by a slow pace, peaceful setting and plain theme, enabling readers to identify with characters and escape from reality. In this article, I scrutinise a ‘farming’ novel under the genre of danmei (aka Boys Love), and further posit that the popularity of ‘farming writing’ is also attributed to the Chinese ethnicity’s devotion to agriculture since time immemorial.</jats:p

Clause-Internal Preposing in Late Archaic Chinese

In this thesis I investigate the preverbal positioning of wh and non-wh-phrases in Late Archaic Chinese (LAC) and the Intervention Effect (Beck 1996a). I first explore non-wh-fronting and discover two landing sites for preposed DPs. Non-wh-objects fronted to the higher position in the left periphery are consistent with a topical interpretation, yet those moved to the lower position between the subject and negation are consistent with a focal interpretation. In the context of negation, pronouns normally move to negation and target a position exclusively for them. I then discuss two types of wh-preposing in LAC. D-linked which-phrases in LAC are topical, therefore they appear in an internal topic position. With respect to non-D-linked wh-DPs, they target one of the two focused positions in the medial domain, either between the internal topic position and negation or between negation and vP. The higher focus position above negation is expected to exclusively permit wh-phrases base-generated above negation, and the lower focused position below negation accommodates wh-adverbials base-generated between negation and vP. I also propose that the inverted order of wh-P is generated via PP inversion followed by separate preposing of wh and P. I finally explore the Intervention Effect. Negation, rather than focus or quantificational phrases, functions as a barrier for the Q-binding of wh-phrases in LAC. Wh-items that have the option to stay in-situ, along with wh-arguments and adverbials that usually move to the lower focus position below negation, are subject to the Intervention Effect caused by negation. As a consequence, these wh-phrases have to land in the higher focus position above negation which is expected to accommodate ‘high’ adverbials exclusively. I propose that the Intervention Effect in LAC is a consequence of Q-binding as feature movement of [wh], interacting with fronting into the hierarchy of clause-internal positions driven by [Topic] or [Focus] features

Exclamation in Late Archaic Chinese

Exclamation is constituted of sentence exclamations and exclamatives. Sentence exclamations in Late Archaic Chinese (LAC) are expressives asserting denoted propositions, parallel to their counterparts in modern Mandarin. Sentence exclamations in LAC also indicate that the asserted propositions fail to meet speakers’ expectations, yet such a sense of surprise is not obligatory. Another property of sentence exclamations in LAC is their compatibility with focus structures whose value is reflected in a degree property. As for exclamatives, although they exist in modern Mandarin, they do not exist in LAC. There are exclamatory constructions involving degree adverbials he and heqi, which, according to traditional analyses (Yang & He, 1992, pp. 899-900; Chu, 1994, p. 303), are exclamatives. Nevertheless, I suggest that exclamatory constructions involving he and heqi in LAC fail to pass the exclamativity tests (Zanuttini & Portner 2000, 2003; Badan & Cheng, 2015), disparate from their modern counterparts, so they should not be treated as true exclamatives

Dialogic Priming and Dynamic Resonance in Autism: Creativity Competing with Engagement in Chinese Children with ASD (Mar, 10.1007/s10803-022-05505-2, 2022)

In the original article there is an error in reference section. (e.g. a number of Du Bois 2014 citations should actually be Du Bois et al. 2014). This has been corrected in this erratum. The original article has been corrected

Illocutional concurrences:The case of evaluative speech acts and face-work in spoken Mandarin and American English

This paper proposes a novel usage-based approach to modal and illocutionary analysis. As a case study, it provides a holistic picture of the interplay between evaluations and face-work (i.a. Goffman 1967) as they occur in the Spoken Callhome corpora of Mandarin and American English. We plotted a conditional inference tree model (Hothorn et al. 2006) to gather what we call language-specific illocutional concurrences (IC). IC encompass converging factors at various levels of verbal experience that contribute both locally (i.e. at the morphosyntactic level) and peripherally (i.e. at the illocutionary level) to the encoding of contextually and culturally situated speech acts or pragmemes (i.a. Mey 2001; Author 2016a). From this study will emerge that Mandarin evaluations tend to include a higher number of instances of propositional face-work, viz. cases where the speaker overtly addresses the hearer as the target of his/her evaluation. Similarly, Mandarin evaluations show higher illocutional complexity, in the sense of having a more diverse pool of overtly coded dimensions that speakers account for whilst making evaluations. Finally, Mandarin evaluations also show a stronger tendency to overtly account for harmonious rapport-maintenance (i.a. Goffman 1967; Spencer-Oatey 2008) and intersubjectivity (i.a. Traugott & Dasher 2002; Traugott 2010)

Diachronic change of rapport orientation and sentence-periphery in Mandarin

This article provides a corpus-based analysis of formal structure and rapport orientation of evaluative speech acts in written Mandarin starting from the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) leading up to the present. It focuses on illocutional concurrences (IC) where the change of rapport management with the interlocutor significantly correlates with evaluative speech acts. The IC are holistic patterns that emerge at various levels of an utterance. They contribute both locally (i.e. at the morphosyntactic level) and peripherally (i.e. at the illocutionary level) to the encoding of contextually and temporally situated speech acts or pragmemes. Mixed methods of hierarchical clustering and multiple correspondence analysis indicate that the recent history of evaluative speech acts in written Chinese is characterised by a shift from prevalently rapport-maintaining orientation to utterances more overtly marked for (im-)politeness. Evaluative language in written Mandarin became less mitigated at the structural level and increasingly oriented towards rapport enhancement and rapport challenge. This shift significantly intersects with a progressive replacement of clause-final particles during the 20th century, especially after the so-called ‘May the 4th Movement’