Interactional functions of truncated predicative complement construction “AP + (dek)le” as topic initiator in Shanghai Wu Chinese conversation

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.