Chapter 10
The on-line construction of meaning in Mandarin Chinese
Focus on relative clauses
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.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Theoretical background
- 2.1The status of postnominal RCs in Chinese
- 2.2Postnominal RCs as category-building constructions
- 3.My survey
- 4.Presentation and analysis of the data
- 5.Summary and conclusions
-
Acknowledgements
-
Notes
-
References