Marked themes in spoken Chinese: a discourse semantics perspective

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on Marked Theme in spoken Chinese. Previous studies have explored the functions of Marked Themes within clauses, but not many researchers have observed this phenomenon from a discourse semantics perspective. Combining the framework of discourse semantics with the use of corpus study, this paper first explores the occurrence of such structures in conversations and then examines their discourse functions. Data from the corpus show that, in line with findings from corpus studies of written texts, the occurrence of Marked Themes is quite low. The inspection of their discourse functions leads to the following preliminary findings: (1) in sequences of activities, Marked Themes often function as lexical cohesive devices to build up taxonomical relations across utterances; (2) from the view point of identification, Marked Themes function as anaphoric devices to help keep track of the Participants in question; (3) from the viewpoint of periodicity, while most Marked Themes convey given information, especially contrastive information, a considerable amount of Marked Themes function as HyperTheme to start new phases of discourse.

KEYWORDS:

• Marked Theme
• taxonomical relations
• identity chains
• HyperNew

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Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their critical comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1.  Li and Thompson (1981, 94) think that time phrases and locative phrases occurring in clause-initial position should also be considered as Topics – Marked Topical Theme in this study.

2.  Following Martin (1992) and Eggins and Slade (1997), the move is defined with reference to clause. In most cases, a move corresponds with a clause. Matthiessen (1995, 434) considered the move as the “basic dialogue unit,” “the contribution an interactant makes to the development of the dialogue.” He thinks that a move “selects in the system of SPEECH FUNCTION for a type of interact, where the speaker adopts a speech functional role and assigns the addressee a complementary role.”

3.  Phase is a term adopted by Martin and Rose ([2003] 2007) and Rose (2006) as an intermediate semantic unit between stages and sequences. The boundaries of a phase are delimited by the consistency of field, tenor and mode. For more detailed discussion, see Martin and Rose ([2003] 2007) and Gao (2012).

4.  Following the transcription conventions of Eggins and Slade (1997), the number before the speaker is turn; here T3 refers to the third turn in the episode. Names in capital are the pseudo names of interlocutors. (i), (ii), etc., mark the moves in each turn. Each move marks a single unit of utterance, in most cases corresponding to a clause in English.

5. The function of the causal conjunction 因为 (yinwei) in conversations has been debated over the past two decades (Biq 1995; Shen 2003; Song and Tao 2008, 2009). While still used as a causal connective, it has developed some new functions beyond connecting two clauses within clause complexes. Across utterances, occurring at the beginning of a new turn or in mid-turn, it functions as a discourse marker whose main function is to link the current utterance with one’s previous utterance which has been cut short by other interlocutors.

6.  你知道吗 (ni zhidao ma, ‘you know’) is considered to be a formulaic expression like you know in English, whose main function is to attract the attention of the listeners, to indicate some shared assumption or to acknowledge the understanding of the other party (Schourup 1985; Östman 1981; Zhang 2008).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yanmei Gao

Yanmei Gao is associate professor at Peking University, Beijing, China. Her research interests include systemic functional linguistics, lexical semantics and discourse semantics. Recently she is working on stance-taking and exchange structures in face-to-face interaction across languages.

Guoyan Lyu

Guoyan Lyu is associate professor in the School of Foreign Studies at Beijing Information Science & Technology University. Guoyan is interested in exploring the functional dimensions of language and syntax-semantics relations in world languages.