scholarly journals Asymmetrical Relationship Construction in Medical Interactions - A Case Study of Advice-giving in Mandarin Chinese

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Li Chuntao
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Advice Giving ◽  
Relationship Construction

Learning opportunities in peer-peer interaction: A case study of two L2 Mandarin Chinese learners

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-226
Author(s):  
Dan Jiang
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Learning Opportunities ◽  
French Immersion ◽  
Chinese Learners ◽  
Instructed Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Negotiation For Meaning

AbstractThe roles of interaction have been studied for several decades. Recent studies have turned to investigate “the details of which components of interaction might be more or less effective in which contexts with which learners” (Loewen, Shawn & Masatoshi Sato. 2018. Interaction and instructed second language acquisition. Language Teaching 51(3). 285–329: 286). This case study, based on three unstructured interactions outside the classroom between two L2 Mandarin Chinese learners, investigates the learning opportunities these interactions brought about in terms of helping them to increase in control over forms that had already been encountered inside the classroom. Using the concept of the language-related episode (Swain, Merrill & Sharon Lapkin. 1998. Interaction and second language learning: Two adolescent French immersion students working together. The Modern Language Journal 82(3). 320–337), this study sets focus on learning opportunities for lexis- and grammar-related items. It finds learning opportunities arise as the two peers negotiate for meaning motivated by the need to comprehend, strive to use the L2 to express/co-express themselves, and improve their form through the other’s feedback. In addition, lexis-related learning is found to be very positive in this study. The dictionary played an indispensable role in facilitating the learners when they encountered lexis-related issues. Further, it enabled the learners to learn new vocabulary when driven by communicative needs. In comparison, the grammar-related learning is found to be relatively complicated. And the fact the learners had nowhere to resort to concerning grammatical issues attributed to it. In terms of the different types of interactions, compared to learning through negotiation for meaning and feedback, output and co-construction/collaboration were found to be most productive in promoting the learning.

Usage, media, and grammaticalization

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-83
Author(s):  
Liang Tao
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Chinese Text ◽  
Language Variation ◽  
Language Variation And Change ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Rhetorical Question ◽  
Beijing Mandarin ◽  
Grammatical Change ◽  
The Impact

Abstract This report presents a case study on a current grammatical change in a rhetorical question 不是…吗 (isn’t it the case…?) and its spreading from spoken Beijing Mandarin to Mandarin Chinese in general. The study addresses three interrelated issues that concern the development and spreading of this new pattern: (1) usage-based language variation and change in spoken Beijing Mandarin; (2) Socio-cultural factors that may have promoted the adaptation of the new pattern in Mandarin Chinese; and (3) the impact of media, which may enhance the rapid spreading of the pattern in China. The report offers another instance of usage as the main driving force leading to language variation and grammaticalization.

Extending the Talmyan typology: A case study of the macro-event as event integration and grammaticalization in Mandarin

2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 585-621 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fuyin Thomas Li
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Event Structure ◽  
Fundamental Concept ◽  
The Past ◽  
Directional Complements ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Number Of Publications

AbstractThe two-way typology proposed by Leonard Talmy has been extremely influential in the past few decades, and has led to a large number of publications. But while the majority of the literature is devoted to the identification of the verb-framed or satellite-framed status of individual languages, relatively little (if any) research focuses on the foundation of this theory. This article addresses the nature of the macro-event, a fundamental concept for the Talmyan two-way typology, proposing a diachronic aspect of the macro-event, an aspect that seems to be under-appreciated or even neglected. It argues that a macro-event results from the integration of two simpler events through grammaticalization in Mandarin. This hypothesis is supported by the behavior of directional complements in Mandarin Chinese in that these directional complements in combination with the main verbs can express all the five types of the macro-events that Talmy has analyzed to establish his typology, and that these macro-events themselves represent an integration of two simpler events and exhibit various degrees of grammaticalization. This study brings together two seemingly unrelated areas of research, that is, the area of event structure and that of grammaticalization, thus providing a new perspective on the Talmyan typological paradigm. The result, though supported by the data in Mandarin Chinese, might have universal value and implications for other languages as well.

scholarly journals A Case Study of Code-switching in a City of East China

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaoping Jie
Keyword(s):  
Data Analysis ◽  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Code Switching ◽  
East China ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
North East ◽  
Language Variety ◽  
Local Dialect

This study attempts to observe how natives of different age groups in a city of south-east China switch between Putonghua (Mandarin Chinese), the H language variety, and the local dialect, the L variety, the linguistic features of different CS patterns, and the function of the H variety in conversation. Topics of the participants’ conversations ranged from family to friends, neighborhood, games, movies, computers and business. Data analysis shows that the participants mainly use the local dialect and Putonghua in their daily conversation, while English and other dialects in China like Cantonese and Dongbeihua (Dialect in north-east China) are also used.

scholarly journals Syntactic discontinuous reduplication with antonymic pairs: a case study from Italian

Linguistics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Masini ◽  
Simone Mattiola
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Functional Properties ◽  
Systematic Study ◽  
Construction Grammar ◽  
Multiple Source ◽  
Comprehensive Account ◽  
Naturally Occurring ◽  
Modern Hebrew ◽  
Similarities And Differences

Abstract This article aims at giving a comprehensive account of a so far undescribed reduplicative pattern in Italian named syntactic discontinuous reduplication with antonymic pairs (SDRA). This pattern, characterized by the non-contiguous repetition of the same element within a larger fixed configuration defined by two spatial antonyms, can be schematized as <Xi Adv1 Xi Adv2>, where Adv1 and Adv2 are antonyms (e.g., di qua ‘here’ ∼ di là ‘there’). After describing its formal and functional properties, based on naturally occurring data extracted from the Italian Web 2016 corpus, the SDRA is analyzed as an independent ‘construction’ in the Construction Grammar sense. This construction is claimed to convey a general value of ‘plurality’ and to have developed a polysemy network of daughter constructions expressing more specific functions such as ‘distributivity,’ ‘related variety,’ and ‘dispersion.’ In addition, we propose considering the SDRA a ‘multiple source construction,’ originating from the blending of two independent constructions: syntactic reduplication and irreversible binomials with antonymic adverbs. Finally, we discuss SDRA-like patterns in other typologically different languages (Russian, Modern Hebrew, Mandarin Chinese, German), pointing out similarities and differences, and paving the way to a more systematic study of discontinuous reduplication in a crosslinguistic perspective.

scholarly journals Evidentiality ‘In’ and ‘As’ Context Corpus-based insights about the Mandarin V-过 construction

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vittorio Tantucci
Keyword(s):  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
Shared Knowledge ◽  
Grammatical Category ◽  
Semantic Categories ◽  
Specific Item ◽  
Linguistic System ◽  
Text Types ◽  
Critical Issues

In this paper we argue that evidentiality can be a category of a linguistic system that emerges from the intersection between form, usage and ‘contextual situatedness’. We provide a multivariate corpus-based case study about the usage of the V-过 guo construction in written Mandarin, and show how the text types in which the chunk appears significantly contribute to determine its pragmatic usage and its emergent meaning grounded in shared knowledge and collective recognition. This approach sheds new light on two critical issues. The first is that evidentiality is an important grammatical category of documentary, factual and academic prose in Mandarin Chinese. The second, much broader, claim of this paper is that generalisations about grammatical/semantic categories need to account for the usage of specific item in context. In this sense, ‘physical and socio-cultural situatedness’ is as important a dimension as form and meaning in order to define categorial membership.

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