Overview

In Grounding in Chinese Written Narrative Discourse Wendan Li offers a comprehensive and innovative account of how Mandarin Chinese, as a language without extensive morphological marking, highlights (or foregrounds) major events of a narrative and demotes (or backgrounds) other supporting descriptions. Qualitative and quantitative methods in the analysis and examinations of authentic written text provide extensive evidence to demonstrate that various types of morpho-syntactic devices are used in a wide range of structural units in Chinese to mark the distinction between foregrounding and backgrounding. The analysis paves the way for future studies to systematically approach grounding-related issues. The typological viewpoint adopted in the chapters serves well readers from both the Chinese tradition and other languages in discourse analysis.

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Taken as a whole, the book is notable in three aspects. First of all, it has considerable significance for typological studies on the grounding phenomenon. [...] Second, as the first study to apply grounding theory in the study of Chinese discourse grammar, this work is both theoretically and methodologically rewarding for Chinese grammar study. [...] Third, the book is user-friendly because it is very well organized. ~ Yurong Zhao, Northeastern University of China, in Chinese Language and Discourse, Vol. 9/2 (2018), pp. 251-255

Author Information

Wendan Li, Ph.D. (1996), is Associate Professor of Chinese Language and Linguistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has published monographs and articles on Chinese language, discourse structure and pedagogy, including Topic Chains in Chinese (Lincom Europa 2005) and Chinese Writing and Calligraphy (University of Hawai'i Press 2010).

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