Local grammar approaches to speech acts in Chinese: A case study of exemplification

Abstract

This study develops a local grammar of exemplification in Chinese and also briefly discusses local grammar analyses of apologies in five selected languages, aiming to explore the feasibility of employing the local grammar approach to account for speech acts in various languages. Using data taken from DiSCUSS, a balanced and representative corpus of spoken Chinese, the analyses identified 13 local grammar patterns of exemplification, which shows the applicability of local grammars in describing speech act realisations in languages other than English. Our discussion further suggests that the resulting local grammar descriptions can not only reveal language-specific features of speech act realisations, but also facilitates contrastive (e.g., cross-linguistic and cross-cultural) speech act studies. The theoretical implications for describing speech act realisations and pedagogical applications for teaching speech acts in L2 contexts are also discussed. It is concluded that local grammar can be a useful and viable approach that can significantly take forward speech act studies.