A Discourse Approach to Causal Sentences in Mandarin Chinese

Language, Information and Computation(PACLIC 11),1996, 93-98 A Discourse Approach to Causal Sentences in Mandarin Chinese Mei-chih Tsai Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica tsmei@hp .iis. sinica. edu.tw Abstract This paper argues that the word order of adverbials can be captured only when the causal clauses are analyzed as focus. Previous studies on Chinese causal sentences usually treat the causal clauses on a par with other types of adverbial clauses. This means that they are considered as topics and predicted to precede the main clauses. However, this account does not hold for the causal clauses. According to recent corpus-based studies, they actually take up both pre-posed and post-posed positions with respect to their main clause. If the adjunct-preceding-main order is overwhelmingly used in Mandarin complex sentences, what can be the reason for that causal sequencing is different from the conditional or concessive one? We will show that it is the focal status of the causal clauses that can account for their distribution. 1. Introduction Most previous studies on Chinese causal sentences treat the causal clauses on a par with other types of adverbial clauses. (cf. Chao 1968, Tsao 1979, 88, Li & Thompson 1981) This means that they are supposed to be topics and manifest the adjunct-preceding-main order as shown in (1). (1) vinwei shengbing le, suoyi to liu zai jia-li. because sick ASP so he stay at home-in 'Because he was sick, he stayed at home.' However, as noticed by recent corpus-based studies, while the adverbial clauses commonly precede the main clauses, the causal ones take up both pre-posed and post-posed positions outside of their main clause. Biq (1995), for example; points out that in both spoken and written data, reason before main point is not necessarily the preferred order for expressing the causal relation. Wang (1995, 96) makes the same claim. 93 If the adjunct-preceding-main order is overwhelmingly used in Mandarin discourse, what can be the reason for that causal sequencing is different form conditional and concessive one? We will show that the traditional analysis which treats adverbial clauses as topic in the topic-comment utterance cannot capture the behavior of causal clauses. Instead, our investigation on the interaction between the syntactic and semantic properties of adverbial clauses in written discourse leads to the two following findings that offer a more comprehensive account of the syntax and semantics of the causal sentences: i. The causal clauses cannot be the topic of the sentence. ii. The causal clauses may be the focus of the sentence. 2. Causal clauses are not topic There are two arguments to show that the causal clauses cannot be the topic of the sentence: the first based on topic chain, and the second based on cleft sentences. First, following Chao (1968), Tsao (1988) argues that the adverbial clauses in Chinese should be more appropriately analyzed as topic. Nevertheless, he points out some counterexamples. For instance, the topic in the causal sentence (2) is the topicalized NP ta 'he' rather than the causal clause ta yinwei shengbing …

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