This article describes a method to analyze characters in a literary text by considering their verbal interactions. This method exploits techniques from computational linguistics to extract all direct speech from a treebank, and to build a conversational network that visualizes the speakers, the listeners and their degree of interaction. We apply this method to create and visualize a conversational network for the Chinese Buddhist Canon. We analyze the protagonists and their interlocutors, and report statistics on their number of utterances and types of listeners, how their speech was reported, and subcommunities in the network.
This article presents the first study on using a parallel corpus to teach Cantonese, the variety of Chinese spoken in Hong Kong. We evaluated this approach with Mandarin-speaking undergraduate students at the beginner level. Exploiting their knowledge of Mandarin, a closely related language, the students studied Cantonese with authentic material in a Cantonese-Mandarin parallel corpus, transcribed from television programs. They were given a list of Mandarin words that yield a range of possible Cantonese translations, depending on the linguistic context. Leveraging sentence and word alignments in the parallel corpus, the students independently searched for example sentences to discover these translation equivalents. Experimental results showed that, in both the short- and long-term, this data-driven learning approach helped students improve their knowledge of Cantonese vocabulary. These results suggest the potential of applying parallel corpora at even the beginners’ level for other L1-L2 pairs of closely related languages.
This paper examines six restructuring processes that have contributed to the development of pragmatic markers at the right periphery-more specifically, sentence final particles (as well as utterance tags)-in Chinese. We first discuss how verb serialization can give rise to an expansion in semantic scope and syntactic recategorization at the right periphery, using Mandarin le as an example. 1 We then consider the process of clausal integration, as illustrated by mitigative and adhortative sentence final particles er yi yi, bale and haole in Mandarin. We next examine the role of right-dislocation in the emergence of utterance tags such as Mandarin epistemic marker kongpa, followed by an analysis of the combined effects of both right-dislocation and clausal integration in the emergence of sentence final particles such as the Cantonese wo-type evidential markers. We also look into 'main-clause ellipsis' which leaves behind connectives that develop into sentence final particles such as Mandarin buguo, a phenomenon that is not as robust in Chinese, but is common in neighbouring verb-final languages. Finally, we discuss the insubordination of nominalization constructions as 'stand-alone' finite structures (e.g. Watters 2008; DeLancey 2011; Yap, Grunow-Hårsta & Wrona 2011; inter alia), whereby nominalizers are reinterpreted as sentence final particles with temporal, modal and attitudinal values. This paper also compares the similarities and differences in the way each of these mophosyntactic strategies are used in Chinese and neighbouring languages such as Japanese and Korean, the former a predominantly verb-medial (SVO) language, while the latter two are verb final (SOV) languages.
This paper examines how utterance-final interrogative particles in Chinese contribute to the management of local and global coherence in conversational discourse. Using Schiffrin’s (1987) model of discourse coherence, and focusing in particular on the Cantonese particle ho2 we show how an interrogative particle is often also used as an interactional particle. In the case of ho2, we show how this information-seeking particle is frequently recruited as an affirmation-seeking and solidarity-enhancing device. Special attention is given to the extended uses of ho2 in terms of Schiffrin’s exchange and action structures, as well as participation frameworks and information states. Our analysis highlights how speakers effectively use utterance particles as exemplified by ho2 to convey their (inter)subjective footing and in the process negotiate meaningful affiliative/disaffiliative interaction among interlocutors, and thereby achieve discourse coherence for effective communication.
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