Units in Mandarin Conversation
Prosody, discourse, and grammar
| National University of Singapore
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
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
Table of Contents
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Preface | p. v
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List of Abbreviations | p. xiii
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List of Tables | p. xv
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List of Figures | p. xvi
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1. Introduction | p. 1
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2. Preliminaries and Methodology | p. 5
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3. Prosodic Properties of Mandarin Intonation Units | p. 32
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4. Grammatical Structure of the Mandarin Intonation Unit | p. 55
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5. The Pragmatics of NP Intonation Units | p. 78
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6. The Preferred Clause Structure in Conversation | p. 108
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7. Non-Anaphoric Elliptical Clausal Intonation Units | p. 128
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8. Low Transitivity Pronominal Full Clausal IUs | p. 149
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9. Units of Speech and of Grammar | p. 174
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10. Conclusions | p. 194
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Notes | p. 197
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Appendix (Transcription Conventions) | p. 217
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Index | p. 219
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BIC Subject: CF – Linguistics
BISAC Subject: LAN009000 – LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General