Temporal and Conditional Clauses in Chinese Spoken Discourse : A Function-based Study

Temporal and conditional clauses in Chinese spoken discourse: A function-based study Yeh, Hui-Chen National Taiwan University Abstract. It is generally agreed that different categories of adverbial clauses—temporal, conditional, and causal clauses may have their different performances of distribution and functions in different positions as preposed vs. postposed. According to Ford (1993 & 1994) and Wang (1996), temporal and conditional clauses in both English and Chinese tend to occur in the initial position (preposed) while causal ones tend to occur in the final position (postposed). It is assumed that the initial adverbial clauses form pivotal points in the development of talk and present explicit background for material that follows; on the other hand, final adverbial clauses which might result from the interactional need only complete a unit of information without creating discourse-level links or shifts. Though the functions of the information sequences of adverbial clauses in Chinese spoken discourse have been well established in Wang's (1996) dissertation, there're still problems unsolved: what are the differences among the various expressions of adverbial connectors in Chinese under the same category of adverbial clauses in English? For example, we have at least three expressions representing when-clause: dang (de shihou) vs. zai...de shihou vs. ...de shihou and ificlause: ruguo...,jiaru...,...de hua for each. Materials are based on 15 texts (aobut 150-minute spoken discourse data) with 200 temporal and conditional clauses in total (113 vs. 87). This paper found significant differences in distribution among these adverbial connectors under the same category of adverbial clauses, argueing that such linguistic performances in spoken discourse are possibly due to their lexical semantic differences and further result in their different discourse functions. 0. Introduction Relations between positions as preposed (initial) and postposed and discourse functions of temporal, conditional, and causal adverbials have been done quite a few. The distribution is that temporal and conditional clauses tend to occur before their modified material (preposed/ initial), while causal clauses are more likely to occur after the modifiee (postposed/final). About the functions of initial temporal adverbials in Chinese discourse, Wang (1996) suggests that their functions are mainly "introducing and shifting time reference and/or offering a contrast". The so-called time reference is "a domain of talk which requires management and attention on the part of conversational participants that it can be generic or specific" (Ford, 1993). And thus it can be shifted from generic to specific, or from specific to generic. The other function of initial temporal clause is it can relate to what precedes it and produce a frame for what follows through contrast. Initial conditional clauses, as proposed by Ford and Thompson (1986), may fall into five types with functions as exploring options, providing polite requests, illustrating, contrasting, and assuming. Haiman (1978) has argued that conditionals have a correlation with topics: "Conditionals, like topics, are given, which constitute the frame of reference with respect to which the main clause is either true or felicitous." Thus the function of initial conditional clauses can be thought as "creating backgrounds for subsequent utterances and presenting a …

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