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.
About the authors
Xiaoting Li is an Associate Professor of Chinese Linguistics at the University of Alberta, Canada. Her research interests include examination of how multimodal resources such as morphosyntax, prosody, and bodily-visual conduct are used by interactants to make meaning in Chinese interaction. She is the author of Multimodality, Interaction, and Turn-taking in Mandarin Conversation (John Benjamins, 2014), and co-editor (with Tsuyoshi Ono) of Multimodality in Chinese Interaction (De Gruyter Mouton, 2019). She is the Director of the Chinese Multimodality Lab at the University of Alberta.
Yaqiong Liu is an Associate Professor of Chinese Linguistics at Shanghai Maritime University, P. R. China. Her main research interests include grammatical phenomena in spoken Chinese, interactional linguistics and genre variation in Chinese discourse.
Appendix A: Transcription conventions
Basic transcription conventions are following Couper-Kuhlen and Barth-Weingarten (2011), with minor modifications.
| (-),(--),(---) | Short, middle or long-pause of ca. 0.2–0.8 s duration; |
| = | Latching; |
| (0.8) | Pauses of approximately 0.8 s duration; |
| :, :: | Lengthening; |
| [, [[ | Speech overlap; |
| (word) | Assumed wording; |
| (X) | Indecipherable syllable or segments; |
| ((nod)) | Paralinguistic and non-linguistic actions; transcriber’s description of events; |
| -> | Refers to a line of transcript relevant in the argument. |
Appendix B: Glossing conventions
| 1SG | First person singular; |
| 2SG | Second person singular; |
| 3SG | Third person singular; |
| CM | Complement marker; |
| CL | Classifier; |
| CRS | Currently relevant state; |
| DUR | Durative aspect; |
| GEN | Genitive; |
| INT | Interjection; |
| NOM | Nominalization; |
| PRT | Particle; |
| QM | Question marker; |
| TM | Topic marker. |
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