Overview
A Discourse Grammar of Mandarin Chinese focuses on the relationships between clauses in Mandarin Chinese in the functional framework. Underlying these relationships are notions like modality, presupposition, topicality, and information structure, encoded by such devices as conjunction, aspect, topic, sentence-particles and subordination. Chauncey Chu devotes a chapter to each of these devices, with a view to discovering their contribution to the coherent organization of Chinese discourse. These devices are finally integrated into a network, culminating in a proposal of the discourse sentence (represented by SENTENCE) to replace the syntactically and/or semantically defined traditional sentence. The organization of SENTENCES into paragraphs also is discussed in the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory.
Full Product Details
Author: Chauncey C Chu
Publisher: Peter Lang Publishing Inc
Imprint: Peter Lang Publishing Inc
Volume: 6
Weight: 0.860kg
ISBN: 9780820438900
ISBN 10: 0820438901
Pages: 484
Publication Date: 01 August 1998
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Available To Order
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Reviews
Professor Chu has finally filled a void in the field with this work. This much awaited book is the first extensive treatment of discourse and pragmatics in Chinese grammar presented to interested readers by him. It is a unique, significant, and much-welcomed scholarly contribution to Chinese linguistics. (Ying-che Li, Professor of Chinese, University of Hawaii at Manoa) This book has something to say to linguists of all persuasions. For those who share the same conviction as the author and myself that Chinese is a discourse-oriented language where grammatical phenomena will have to go beyond sentence-level description for explanation, this book demonstrates an appropriate way of doing grammatical analysis in a language like Mandarin Chinese. Even for a formalist, Chu's grammar can be viewed as a revealing description, complementing what has been done in a more formal framework. (Feng-fu Tsao, Professor of Linguistics, Tsing Hua University, Taiwan)
Author Information
The Author: Chauncey C. Chu, Professor of Chinese and Linguistics at the University of Florida, has been engaged in research in functional syntax and discourse grammar for more than twenty years. His main publications include A Reference Grammar of Mandarin Chinese for English Speakers (Peter Lang, 1983), Historical Syntax: Theory and Application to Chinese (1987), and over sixty journal articles and book chapters published in the United States, Europe, Taiwan, mainland China, Hong Kong, and Singapore.
