Units in Mandarin Conversation

Prosody, discourse, and grammar

Author

Hongyin Tao | National University of Singapore

Hardbound – Available

ISBN 9789027226150 (Eur) | EUR 105.00

ISBN 9781556193712 (USA) | USD 158.00

e-Book –

ISBN 9789027276100 | EUR 105.00 | USD 158.00

This book provides a new way of studying grammar. The basic thrust of the book is to investigate grammar based on a prosodic unit, the intonation unit (IU), in spontaneous speech. The author challenges the dominant practice in the study of syntax, which has been to focus on the unit of the artificially constructed sentence. The book shows that some basic notions developed from sentence-level data often do not account well for speech data. For example, in many versions of syntactic theory, the basic syntactic structure of any sentence is assumed to comprise both an NP and a VP (with variations in terminology). However the author shows that a Mandarin sentence in spoken discourse can consist of a lone NP or a transitive verbal expression without any explicit argument (which is not due to anaphora). Although the book concerns Mandarin discourse and grammar, it will be of interest to students of a wide range of fields, including discourse analysis, syntax, conversation analysis, prosodic studies, and typological studies.

[Studies in Discourse and Grammar, 5] 1996. xvi, 226 pp.

Publishing status: Available

https://doi.org/10.1075/sidag.5

Table of Contents

Preface | p. v

List of Abbreviations | p. xiii

List of Tables | p. xv

List of Figures | p. xvi

1. Introduction | p. 1

2. Preliminaries and Methodology | p. 5

3. Prosodic Properties of Mandarin Intonation Units | p. 32

4. Grammatical Structure of the Mandarin Intonation Unit | p. 55

5. The Pragmatics of NP Intonation Units | p. 78

6. The Preferred Clause Structure in Conversation | p. 108

7. Non-Anaphoric Elliptical Clausal Intonation Units | p. 128

8. Low Transitivity Pronominal Full Clausal IUs | p. 149

9. Units of Speech and of Grammar | p. 174

10. Conclusions | p. 194

Notes | p. 197

Appendix (Transcription Conventions) | p. 217

Index | p. 219

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