A Corpus-Based Study of Adverbial Clauses in Mandarin Chinese Conversations : A Preliminary Analysis

A Corpus-Based Study of Adverbial Clauses in Mandarin Chinese Conversations: A Preliminary Analysis Y u-Fang Wang Graduate Institute of English , National Taiwan Normal University Abstract In conversation, adverbial clause subordination is most commonly achieved through temporal, conditional, concessive, and causal conjunctions, such as dang (` when'), ruguoCin, suiran (`although'), yinwei (` because'), etc. in Mandarin Chinese. This study aims at exploring adverbial clauses in spoken Mandarin conversations on the basis of quantitative analysis. There were two-hour conversation database in this research. The adverbial clauses in our database were divided into (a) preposed clauses to their modified material with continuing intonation, (b) postposed clauses to their modified material with continuing intonation, and (c) postposed clauses to their modified material with final intonation (rising question intonation or final falling intonation). After an inspection of our data, we find that the temporal, conditional, and concessive clauses favor to occur before their modified material; and the causal ones, after their associated material. Our data show that causal clauses are fundamentally different from temporal, conditional, and concessive ones in their use. 1. Introduction The study of the different types of adverbial clauses in the past has been done almost exclusively by logicians, who analyzed the relationship between the adverbial clause and the main clause in terms of truth value, material implication, presupposition, etc. This solely semantic analysis did not allow for notions such as organization and content of the discourse, communicative intent or pragmatic motivations of speaker and hearer. Since these notions did not become the concern of linguistics until recently, we still do not have a clear understanding of the behavior of the different types of adverbial clauses in discourse. One of the most recent discourse analysis of different types of adverbial clauses is Chafe's ([2]). This study analyzes the adverbial clauses in spoken and written texts and suggests that adverbial clauses vary their functions with respect to two factors. One has to do with their position in relation to the main clause; the other has to do with how tightly the adverbial clause is bound to its main clause. Another work concerning this type of phenomenon is Ford's study on the distribution of adverbial clauses in American English conversations ([7]). She aims at defining the distribution of adverbial clauses in discourse. Especially her study analyzes the interactional factors that determine whether an adverbial clause will be placed before or after its main clause and concludes that preposed and postposed clauses with different intonation are performing different functions in discourse. The above mentioned two studies offered illuminating insights into the behavior of different types of adverbial clauses. Following their models, this study is an attempt to investigate adverbial clauses in spoken Mandarin conversations on the basis of quantitative analysis. 2. Data and Methods My corpus contains eleven naturally occurring face-to-face, two party, and multi-party conversations, totaling 123:43 minutes. They were taped via audio cassette and transcribed into intonation units (for details, see [5]). Clauses ending with a fall intonation were marked with a …

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