중국어 말차례 시작지점에 분포하는 언어요소의 실제

Abstract

This study examines the CallFriend corpus of spoken Mandarin Chinese to investigate the phenomena of turn-initial elements. A turn-initial element is broadly defined as the first form with which a speaker starts a new turn in a conversation. By examining a set of high-frequency short turn initiators, it is found that turn initiators in Mandarin Chinese are overwhelmingly lexical, and they also tend to be syntactically independent. An examination of turn-initial elements in naturally occurring spoken conversation in Mandarin Chinese reveals important discourse-pragmatic functions of turn initiators—including an interactional function, a discourse structure-function, and a stance marking function—that fulfill the criteria of being superfluous to transactional needs. It is thus suggested that one of the designing features of the grammar of turns in spoken Mandarin Chinese involves a short free form of some sort, and Mandarin Chinese can be considered a turn-initial and final language in grammaticalizing turn signals.