Surface cues and pragmatic interpretation of given/new in Mandarin Chinese and English: A comparative study  

Oleh:

Chen, Shu-Hui

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Journal of Pragmatics: An Interdiciplinary Journal of Language Studies vol. 44 no. 04 (2012), page 490–507.
Topik: Surface cues Given/new interpretation Mandarin Chinese English The Competition Model
Fulltext: Chen_S.H.pdf (310.03KB)

Isi artikel

Formal surface devices at syntactic, prosodic, and semantic levels may converge, compete, or conspire with each other for specific meanings/functions assignment, such as given and newinterpretation. Studies basedontheCompetitionModel have shownthat form–function mappings are assigned different strengths determined by the statistical distributions of certain attributes of the cues, depending on language structure. In viewof the qualitative and quantitative differences between Mandarin Chinese and English, this comparative study, by adopting a verification task, investigates the similarities and differences in the utilization of the surface cues ofword order,markedcleft structure, animacy, and focal accent betweenthe twolanguages for givenandnewinterpretationwithinanisolated sentence. Forty Taiwanese MandarinandAmericanEnglish adult speakers, each with 20, were asked to verify a stimulus sentence against a pair of pictures to measure their interpretation of the given and new distinctions implied in a particular stimulus. The results showed that the hierarchy of cue strength in Mandarin Chinese, in descending order, was word order, animacy, focal accent, and cleft, while that in English was cleft,word order, focal accent, and animacy. The findings support the interactive constraint-based view of pragmatic processing, and reveal crosslinguistic variations, which were explored from typological, psycholinguistic, and information patterning perspectives

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