Cover not available
Article published In:
Studies in Language
Vol. 43:1 (2019) ► pp.92–119

Linguistic typology, language modality, and stuff like that

A corpus-based study on the general extender zhilei(de) ‘of that kind’ in spoken and written Chinese

ORCID logo | Graduate Institute of Linguistics, National Taiwan University

Pragmatic particles termed general extenders (GE) have been examined across languages and are found to serve multiple functions. Despite the fruitful findings, few study the use of GEs in different language modalities and in typologically more different languages such as Chinese. This research aims to contribute to this literature by investigating the use of the GE zhilei(de) (zld), ‘of that kind,’ in spoken and written Chinese. Data from corpora of spoken and written Chinese suggest that zld displays some distinctive patterns in its form and function, partly due to the typological traits of Mandarin Chinese. The results also indicate that the language modality where zld is deployed may have impacts on its structural and functional distribution. The current article thus holds implications not only for the literature of GEs but also for the study of the interface between linguistic typology, language modality, and pragmatic expressions.

Keywords: general extender, categorization, zhileide , typology, language modality, Mandarin Chinese
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1The GE under scrutiny
    • 1.2Research questions
    • 1.3Organization of this article
  • 2.Previous studies on GE’s form and function
    • 2.1Forms of GEs
    • 2.2Functions of GEs
  • 3.Data and methodology
  • 4.Structural patterns of zld in spoken and written discourse
  • 5.Collocates of zld in spoken and written discourse
    • 5.1Collocates that precede zld
    • 5.2Collocates that follow zld
  • 6.Functions of zld in spoken and written discourse
  • 7.Discussion and conclusion
    • 7.1 zld and other GEs
    • 7.2Grammaticalization of zld
    • 7.3 zld and the typological characteristics of Mandarin
    • 7.4 zld in spoken and written discourse
    • 7.5Implications and further studies
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • Transcription conventions
  • References
Published online: 12 June 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.18009.hsi
References
Aijmer, Karin
2002 English discourse particles: Evidence from a corpus. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Barsalou, Lawrence W.
1983 Ad hoc categories. Memory & Cognition 111. 211–227. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Biq, Yung-O.
2004 People, things and stuff: General nouns in spoken Mandarin. Concentric: Studies in Linguistics 301. 41–64.Google Scholar
Channell, Joanna
1994 Vague language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Chen, Ping
1999 Modern Chinese: History and sociolinguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chen, Keh-Jiann, Chu-Ren Huang, Li-Ping Chang & Hui-Li Hsu
1996 Sinica corpus: Design methodology for balanced corpora. Proceedings of the 11th Pacific Asia conference on language, 167–176.Google Scholar
Cheshire, Jenny
2007 Discourse variation, grammaticalisation and stuff like that. Journal of Sociolinguistics 111. 155–193. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chui, Kawai & Huei-ling Lai
2008 The nccu corpus of spoken chinese: Mandarin, hakka, and southern min. Taiwan Journal of Linguistics 61. 119–144.Google Scholar
Comrie, Bernard
2008 Prenominal relative clauses in verb-object languages. Language and Linguistics 91. 723–733.Google Scholar
Dines, Elizabeth R.
1980 Variation in discourse – “and stuff like that”. Language in Society 91. 13–31. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dryer, Matthew S.
2005 Relationship between the order of object and verb and the order of relative clause and noun. In Martin Haspelmath, Matthew Dryer, David Gil & Bernard Comrie (eds.), The world atlas of language structures, 390–393. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Du Bois, John W., Stephan Schuetze-Coburn, Susanna Cumming & Danae Paolino
1993 Outline of discourse transcription. In Jane. A. Edwards & Martin D. Lampert (eds.), Talking data: Transcription and coding in discourse research, 45–89. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Fernández, Julieta
2015 General extender use in spoken Peninsular Spanish: metapragmatic awareness and pedagogical implications. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching 21. 1–17. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fischer, Kerstin
2000 From cognitive semantics to leixcal pragmatics: The functional polysemy of discourse particles. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Halliday, M. A. K.
1989 Spoken and written language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
1994 An introduction to functional grammar. London: E. Arnold.Google Scholar
Hopper, Paul J. & Elizabeth C. Traugott
2003 Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hsieh, Fuhui
2005 Mandarin Chinese shenme in interaction. Tatung Journal of General Education 11. 207–222.Google Scholar
Jefferson, Gail
1990 List construction as a task and resource. In George Psathas (ed.), Interactional competence, 63–92. New York: Irvington Publishers.Google Scholar
Lauwereyns, Shizuka
2002 Hedges in Japanese conversation: The influence of age, sex, and formality. Language Variation and Change 141. 239–259. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lee, Heeju, Danjie Su & Hongyin Tao
2017 A crosslinguistic study of some extended uses of what-based interrogative expressions in Chinese, English, and Korean. Chinese Language and Discourse 81. 137–173. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lerner, Gene H.
1994 Responsive list construction: A conversational resource for accomplishing multifaceted social action. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 131. 20–33. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Li, Charles N. & Sandra A. Thompson
1981 Mandarin Chinese: A functional reference grammar. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Li, Ing Cherry
1999 Utterance-final particles in Taiwanese: A discourse pragmatic analysis. Taipei: Crane.Google Scholar
Lyons, John
1977 Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge Unversity Press.Google Scholar
Martínez, Ignacio M. Palacios
2011 “I might, I might go I mean it depends on money things and stuff”. A preliminary analysis of general extenders in British teenagers’ discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 431. 2452–2470. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mauri, Caterina
2014 What do connectives and plurals have in common? The linguistic expression of ad hoc categories. In Joanna Blochowiak, Stephanie Durrleman-Tame, Cristina Grisot & Christopher Laenzlinger (eds.), Linguistic papers dedicated to Jacques Moeschler. Genève: University of Geneva Publication.Google Scholar
2017 Building and interpreting ad hoc categories: A linguistic analysis. In Joanna Blochowiak, Cristina Grisot, Stephanie Durrleman-Tame & Christopher Laenzlinger (eds.), Formal models in the study of language, 1–23. Berlin: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mauri, Caterina & Andrea Sansò
2018 Linguistic strategies for ad hoc categorization: Theoretical assessment and cross-linguistic variation. Folia Linguistica Historica 391. 1–35.Google Scholar
Overstreet, Maryann
1999 Whales, candlelight, and stuff like that: General extenders in English discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
2005  And stuff und so: Investigating pragmatic expressions in English and German. Journal of Pragmatics 371. 1845–1864. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Parvaresh, Vahid, Manoochehr Tavangar & Abbas Eslami Rasekh
2010 General extenders in Persian discourse: Frequency and grammatical distribution. Cross-Cultural Communication 61. 18–35.Google Scholar
Secova, Maria
2014 ‘Je sais et tout mais…’ might the general extenders in European French be changing? Journal of French Language Studies 241. 281–304. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stassen, Leon
2000 AND-languages and WITH-languages. Linguistic Typology 41. 1–55. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Verdonik, Darinka
2015 Internal variety in the use of Slovene general extenders in different spoken discourse settings. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 201. 445–468. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wang, Li
1980 Hanyu shigao (History of the Chinese language). Beijing: Zhonghua Shuzu.Google Scholar
Winter, Joanne & Catrin Norrby
2000 Set marking tags-‘and stuff’. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 1999 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society.
Wu, Ruey-Jiuan Regina
2004 Stance in talk: A conversation analysis of Mandarin final particles. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Yap, Foong Ha & Stephen Matthews
2008 The development of nominalizers in East Asian and Tibeto-Burman languages. In María José López-Couso & Elena Seoane (eds.), Rethinking grammaticalization: New perspectives, 309–341. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Yap, Foong Ha, Stephen Matthews & Kaoru Horie
2004 From pronominalizer to pragmatic marker Implications for unidirectionality from a crosslingusitic perspective. In Olga Fischer, Muriel Norde & Harry Perridon (eds.), Up and down the cline: The nature of grammaticalization, 137–168. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Yap, Foong Ha, Fanny Pik-ling Choi & Kam-siu Cheung
2010 Delexicalizing di . In An Van linden, Jean-Christophe Verstraete, and Kristin Davidse (eds.), Formal evidence in grammaticalization research, 63–91. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Kim, Minju
2022. Intersubjectivity, stance, and Korean general extenders. Journal of Pragmatics 193 ► pp. 253 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 14 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.