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Chapter 10. The on-line construction of meaning in Mandarin Chinese

Focus on relative clauses
  • Giorgio Francesco Arcodia
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Building Categories in Interaction
This chapter is in the book Building Categories in Interaction

Abstract

Mandarin Chinese employs a fairly wide range of constructions to encode categories, and specifically ad hoc categories. These include, for instance, a general extender as 等等 děng(děng) ‘etc., and so on’, non-exhaustive connectives as 啊 ā… 啊 ā (see Zhang 2008), exemplifying constructions, and so on. In this paper, I focus on the use of a specific strategy of on-line category construction in Chinese, namely postnominal relative clauses (RCs). Postnominal RCs are particularly interesting since in Mandarin Chinese, as in nearly every Sinitic language, normally all modifiers (including RCs) appear before the head noun; it has been proposed that postnominal RCs are always added as afterthoughts, to resolve a potentially ambiguous reference, or just to narrow down the scope of predication (see Wang & Wu 2020). I conduct a manual search of postnominal RCs in excerpts of transcribed spoken dialogue from the National Broadcast Media Language Corpus, and I propose an analysis of the use of postnominal RCs as devices for on-line categorization, focussing on their interaction with other strategies for category-building. I also discuss the pragmatic and functional correlates of the use of postnominal RCs, as opposed to canonical, prenominal RCs.

Abstract

Mandarin Chinese employs a fairly wide range of constructions to encode categories, and specifically ad hoc categories. These include, for instance, a general extender as 等等 děng(děng) ‘etc., and so on’, non-exhaustive connectives as 啊 ā… 啊 ā (see Zhang 2008), exemplifying constructions, and so on. In this paper, I focus on the use of a specific strategy of on-line category construction in Chinese, namely postnominal relative clauses (RCs). Postnominal RCs are particularly interesting since in Mandarin Chinese, as in nearly every Sinitic language, normally all modifiers (including RCs) appear before the head noun; it has been proposed that postnominal RCs are always added as afterthoughts, to resolve a potentially ambiguous reference, or just to narrow down the scope of predication (see Wang & Wu 2020). I conduct a manual search of postnominal RCs in excerpts of transcribed spoken dialogue from the National Broadcast Media Language Corpus, and I propose an analysis of the use of postnominal RCs as devices for on-line categorization, focussing on their interaction with other strategies for category-building. I also discuss the pragmatic and functional correlates of the use of postnominal RCs, as opposed to canonical, prenominal RCs.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Chapter 1. Building categories in interaction 1
  4. Chapter 2. Ad hoc categorization in linguistic interaction 9
  5. Chapter 3. Categories at the interface of cognition and action 35
  6. Chapter 4. Category-building lists between grammar and interaction 73
  7. Chapter 5. Are new words predictable? 111
  8. Chapter 6. The Camel Humps prosodic pattern 155
  9. Chapter 7. Making the implicit explicit 187
  10. Chapter 8. Online text mapping 211
  11. Chapter 9. Exemplification in interaction 239
  12. Chapter 10. The on-line construction of meaning in Mandarin Chinese 271
  13. Chapter 11. Et cetera, eccetera, etc. The development of a general extender from Latin to Italian 295
  14. Chapter 12. Morphopragmatics of rhyming and imitative co-compounds in Russian 317
  15. Chapter 13. Encoding ad hoc categories in Georgian 355
  16. Chapter 14. French type-noun constructions based on genre 373
  17. Chapter 15. In a manner of speaking 415
  18. Chapter 16. Why it’s hard to construct ad hoc number concepts 439
  19. Index 463
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.220.10arc

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Chapter 1. Building categories in interaction 1
  4. Chapter 2. Ad hoc categorization in linguistic interaction 9
  5. Chapter 3. Categories at the interface of cognition and action 35
  6. Chapter 4. Category-building lists between grammar and interaction 73
  7. Chapter 5. Are new words predictable? 111
  8. Chapter 6. The Camel Humps prosodic pattern 155
  9. Chapter 7. Making the implicit explicit 187
  10. Chapter 8. Online text mapping 211
  11. Chapter 9. Exemplification in interaction 239
  12. Chapter 10. The on-line construction of meaning in Mandarin Chinese 271
  13. Chapter 11. Et cetera, eccetera, etc. The development of a general extender from Latin to Italian 295
  14. Chapter 12. Morphopragmatics of rhyming and imitative co-compounds in Russian 317
  15. Chapter 13. Encoding ad hoc categories in Georgian 355
  16. Chapter 14. French type-noun constructions based on genre 373
  17. Chapter 15. In a manner of speaking 415
  18. Chapter 16. Why it’s hard to construct ad hoc number concepts 439
  19. Index 463
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