Adverbial Clauses in Mandarin Chinese

The aim of this study is to demonstrate the usefulness of corpus linguistics as a methodology in grammar studies. By analysing naturally occurring spoken and written samples from various corpora, the author examines the distribution of subjects across the semantic domains and information structure of adverbial clauses and across text types.

What are adverbial clauses in Chinese? Do they all have subjects as their counterparts do in English? How do the semantic domains of adverbial clauses interact with the distribution of subjects? How do Chinese corpora help us explore these intriguing questions? The aim of this study is to demonstrate the usefulness of corpus linguistics as a methodology in grammar studies. A problem-oriented tagging approach has been used to enable the exploration of adverbial clauses in the corpus and to identify eleven semantically based classes of adverbial clauses. While it is a well-known fact that Chinese adverbial clauses (CACs) are overtly marked by a subordinating conjunction, their subjects can be left unexpressed and recovered in the prior discourse. By analysing naturally occurring spoken and written samples from various corpora, the author examines this intriguing phenomenon of overt and non-overt subjects in adverbial clauses.

Autorentext
May L-Y Wong received her PhD in Linguistics in 2005 from Lancaster University. She is currently Honorary Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include quantitative corpus linguistics, varieties of English, cognitively-inspired theories of language and the integration of corpus linguistics and cognitive linguistics.

Inhalt

Contents: Chinese corpora and their application - Corpus-based approaches to adverbial clauses - Compilation of a sample corpus of skeleton-parsed sentences - subordinators in adverbial clauses - Typology of adverbial clauses - Semantic classes and non-overt subjects of adverbial clauses in spoken and written Chinese.