Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

The Relevance of the principle of Relevance for Word Order Variation in Complex Referring Expressions in Mandarin Chinese

The Relevance of the principle of Relevance for Word Order Variation in Complex Referring... Abstract Word order variation in Mandarin Chinese results in two constructions consisting of a noun phrase (NP), a cluster of a demonstrative and a classifier (DM), and a relative clause (RC): the OMN with the RC+DM+NP order and the IMN with DM+RC+NP order. This study used corpus data to show correlational patterns of constructional choices. Specifically, OMN is associated with new and inanimate NPs serving the grammatical role of object in the relative clause that serves the discourse function of identification. By contrast, for IMN, the head NP tends to carry given information, tends to be an animate entity, tends to serve the grammatical role of subject in the relative clause, and tends to have an RC that serves the discourse function of characterization. We suggest that the usage patterns can be interpreted in terms of the cognitive and communicative principles of relevance (Sperber and Wilson 1995). http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Lodz Papers in Pragmatics de Gruyter

The Relevance of the principle of Relevance for Word Order Variation in Complex Referring Expressions in Mandarin Chinese

Download PDF
28 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/de-gruyter/the-relevance-of-the-principle-of-relevance-for-word-order-variation-bJqVD4Iqlh
Publisher
de Gruyter
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 by the
ISSN
1895-6106
eISSN
1898-4436
DOI
10.1515/lpp-2015-0005
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Abstract Word order variation in Mandarin Chinese results in two constructions consisting of a noun phrase (NP), a cluster of a demonstrative and a classifier (DM), and a relative clause (RC): the OMN with the RC+DM+NP order and the IMN with DM+RC+NP order. This study used corpus data to show correlational patterns of constructional choices. Specifically, OMN is associated with new and inanimate NPs serving the grammatical role of object in the relative clause that serves the discourse function of identification. By contrast, for IMN, the head NP tends to carry given information, tends to be an animate entity, tends to serve the grammatical role of subject in the relative clause, and tends to have an RC that serves the discourse function of characterization. We suggest that the usage patterns can be interpreted in terms of the cognitive and communicative principles of relevance (Sperber and Wilson 1995).

Journal

Lodz Papers in Pragmatics – de Gruyter

Published: Jul 8, 2015

There are no references for this article.