Marked themes in spoken Chinese: A discourse semantics perspective

Abstract

This paper focuses on Marked Theme in spoken Chinese. Previous studies have explored the functions of Marked Themes within clauses, but not many researchers have observed this phenomenon from a discourse semantics perspective. Combining the framework of discourse semantics with the use of corpus study, this paper first explores the occurrence of such structures in conversations and then examines their discourse functions. Data from the corpus show that, in line with findings from corpus studies of written texts, the occurrence of Marked Themes is quite low. The inspection of their discourse functions leads to the following preliminary findings: (1) in sequences of activities, Marked Themes often function as lexical cohesive devices to build up taxonomical relations across utterances; (2) from the view point of identification, Marked Themes function as anaphoric devices to help keep track of the Participants in question; (3) from the viewpoint of periodicity, while most Marked Themes convey given information, especially contrastive information, a considerable amount of Marked Themes function as HyperTheme to start new phases of discourse.