Special issue articles
Construction in conversation
An Interactional Construction Grammar approach to the use of xiangshuo ‘think’ in spoken Taiwan
Mandarin
Although the Construction Grammar (CxG) model has yielded fruitful findings, the role that pragmatics plays in
language has not yet been fully considered in this theoretical framework. The recent development of spoken corpora, however,
enables construction grammarians to develop a new approach called Interactional Construction Grammar, which incorporates
interactional factors into CxG analysis to account for patterns that involve interpersonal functions and global contexts. Adopting
this approach, the present study attempts to examine the use of a complement-taking mental predicate xiangshuo in
Taiwan Mandarin conversation and analyze the co-occurrence patterns of this cognitive verb with different subjects. We identify
three sequential patterns in which xiangshuo most frequently occurs, including account-giving,
contrast-projecting and involvement-constructing, and argue that only by taking into account the sequential context and
interactional function can the distribution patterns of subjects and particles that recurrently collocate with
xiangshuo be explained.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Previous research on xiangshuo
- 3.Data and methodology
- 4.The co-occurrence patterns of xiangshuo and different subjects
- 5.Sequential patterns of xiangshuo in interaction
- 5.1The account-giving sequence
- 5.2The contrast-projecting sequence
- 5.3The involvement-constructing sequence
- 6.Conclusion
- Notes
- Abbreviations
- Transcription conventions
-
References
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