{"title":"Interactional functions of truncated predicative complement construction “AP + (dek)le” as topic initiator in Shanghai Wu Chinese conversation","authors":"Xiaoting Li, Yaqiong Liu","doi":"10.1515/text-2020-0154","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract “VP/AP + (dek)le + AP/VP” is a predicative complement construction in Shanghai Wu Chinese (SWC) with (dek)le being the complement marker. In everyday SWC conversation, the terminal complement is often dropped, forming the Truncated Predicative Complement Construction (TPCC): “AP + (dek)le”. The data for the present study are approximately 4.5 h of naturalistic SWC face-to-face conversations. Adopting the methodology of conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, we explore the interactional functions of the TPCC in the SWC conversational data. We find that TPCCs after the possible closure of a topic are deployed to initiate a new topic in two ways: initiating a disjunctive topic shift, and changing to a topic that is connected to a prior one. The findings demonstrate that TPCCs are routinized grammatical patterns accomplishing the conversational action of initiating new topics in SWC conversation.","PeriodicalId":46455,"journal":{"name":"Text & Talk","volume":"43 1","pages":"45 - 67"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8000,"publicationDate":"2022-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Text & Talk","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2020-0154","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"COMMUNICATION","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract “VP/AP + (dek)le + AP/VP” is a predicative complement construction in Shanghai Wu Chinese (SWC) with (dek)le being the complement marker. In everyday SWC conversation, the terminal complement is often dropped, forming the Truncated Predicative Complement Construction (TPCC): “AP + (dek)le”. The data for the present study are approximately 4.5 h of naturalistic SWC face-to-face conversations. Adopting the methodology of conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, we explore the interactional functions of the TPCC in the SWC conversational data. We find that TPCCs after the possible closure of a topic are deployed to initiate a new topic in two ways: initiating a disjunctive topic shift, and changing to a topic that is connected to a prior one. The findings demonstrate that TPCCs are routinized grammatical patterns accomplishing the conversational action of initiating new topics in SWC conversation.
期刊介绍:
Text & Talk (founded as TEXT in 1981) is an internationally recognized forum for interdisciplinary research in language, discourse, and communication studies, focusing, among other things, on the situational and historical nature of text/talk production; the cognitive and sociocultural processes of language practice/action; and participant-based structures of meaning negotiation and multimodal alignment. Text & Talk encourages critical debates on these and other relevant issues, spanning not only the theoretical and methodological dimensions of discourse but also their practical and socially relevant outcomes.