Phonetic Variants of Response Particles o and a in Mandarin Conversations: The Role of Nasalization and Glottalization in Interaction

Dementia research has frequently documented high rates of caregiver depression and distress in spouses providing care for a partner suffering from dementia. However, the role of marital communication in understanding caregiver distress has not been examined sufficiently. Studies with healthy couples demonstrated an association between marital communication and the partners' psychological well-being, depressiveness, respectively (e.g., Heene, Buysee, & Van Oost, 2005). The current study investigates the relationship between caregiver depression and communication in 37 couples in which the wives care for their partners with dementia. Nonsequential and sequential analyses revealed significant correlations between caregiver depression and marital communication quality. Caregivers whose husbands used more positive communication reported less depression and distress. Additionally, caregiver depression was negatively correlated with rates of positive reciprocal communication indicating dependence between the couples' interaction patterns. This study is one of the first to illustrate the relevance of spousal communication in understanding caregiver distress and depression.

Mandarin Chinese is a particle-rich language. Using conversation analysis as its research method, the present study examines one of the Mandarin final particles, namely the particle ba , and illustrates its interactional imports in complying responses to three types of directive actions including requests, suggestions, and proposals. It is argued that the particle ba serves as a conversational resource that is employed at the end of compliance tokens like hao or xing (good or okay) to modify or, to put it more specifically, downgrade its speaker’s commitment. By indicating the reserved or downgraded commitment in an off-record way, participants show their orientation to preserving and maintaining social solidarity. This study contributes to the understanding of commitment in social interaction, especially in responsive actions. Together with other conversation analytic studies on the particle ba , this study also contributes to the understanding of the core meaning and function of the particle ba as a conversational object.

“There is more here than meets the eye!”: the use of final ou in two sequential positions in Mandarin Chinese conversation

While the study of classifiers in Modern Standard Mandarin Chinese has been discussed extensively in the literature, there are also key differences in the classifiers between Singapore Mandarin Chinese and other varieties of Modern Standard Mandarin Chinese, such as Mainland China Mandarin Chinese. Yet, classifiers in Singapore Mandarin Chinese have been minimally explored. With a corpus-based approach, involving both the written and spoken data sampled from Singapore Mandarin Chinese, this study aims to carry out a comprehensive and systematic investigation of the classifiers in Singapore Mandarin Chinese, and thereafter compare the classifiers between the (a) written and spoken data of Singapore Mandarin Chinese, and between (b) Singapore Mandarin Chinese and Mainland China Mandarin Chinese. In addition, this study will also look into the “adjective+classfier” adjectival phrase structure in Singapore Mandarin Chinese. The findings of this study will not only serve as an important reference for future studies of Singapore Mandarin Chinese classifiers, but also contribute to the theoretical discussion on classifiers in general and language variation and change.

Introduction The organization of repair has received sustained interest in the study of language and social interaction over the past decades. Although, until recently, research in this area has based its claims primarily on English materials, there has been a growing interest, especially in the past ten years or so, in exploring how repair operates in languages other than English. This expanding body of research includes studies of German (e.g., Egbert 1996, 1997b, 2004; Selting 1988, 1992, 1996; Uhmann 2001), Japanese (e.g., Fox et al . 1996), Korean (e.g., Kim 1999a, 2001), Thai (e.g., Moerman 1977), and Mandarin Chinese (e.g., Chui 1996; Tao et al . 1999; Wu 2006; Zhang 1998), among others. Some of these studies have focused on the mechanisms of self- and other-initiation of repair in the languages examined (e.g., Chui 1996; Kim 1999a, 2001; Moerman 1977; Zhang 1998), while others have uncovered the linkages between repair and other aspects of interactional practice, such as prosody (e.g., Selting 1996; Tao et al . 1999) and bodily conduct (e.g., Egbert 1996), and still others have explored the relation between repair and syntax from a cross-linguistic perspective (e.g., Fox et al . 1996). As part of this growing effort to understand the organization of repair across languages, this chapter investigates two repeat-formatted other-initiated repair practices in Mandarin conversation. Using the methodology of conversation analysis (CA), this study will show that the two Mandarin repair initiations under examination, like other-initiation of repair in English, serve not only to initiate repair but also as vehicles for accomplishing additional negatively valenced actions, such as displaying a stance of disbelief or nonalignment.

Yinwei ‘because’ is a causal conjunction or preposition indicating a causal relation between two clauses, NPs and other discourse units in Mandarin Chinese. Building on the previous research, this study examines how yinwei is used by conversational participants to organize talk and accomplish interactional tasks in Mandarin conversation. Adopting the methodologies of conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, this study examines 11 hours of everyday Mandarin conversational data, and explores the interactional functions of yinwei-clauses. An examination of the data shows that yinwei-clauses have a variety of interactional functions in everyday Mandarin conversation. Two particular interactional functions of yinwei-clauses are accounts for a speaker’s prior action such as disagreement and strong assertion, and parentheticals providing background information related to the ongoing talk.

Phonetic variability has long been considered a confounding factor for emotional speech processing, so phonetic features have been rarely explored. However, surprisingly some features with purely phonetic information have shown state-of-the-art performance for continuous prediction of emotions (e.g., arousal and valence), for which the underlying causes are unknown to date. In this article, we present in-depth investigations into phonetic features on three widely used corpora - RECOLA, SEMAINE and USC CreativeIT - to explore this from two perspectives: acoustic space partitioning information and phonetic content. First, comparisons of multiple different partitioning methods confirm the significance of partitioning information in speech, and reveal the new understanding that varying the number of partitions has a greater effect on valence than arousal prediction: a detailed representation of the acoustic space is needed for valence, whilst a general one is adequate for arousal. Second, phoneme-specific examination of phonetic features suggests that phonetic content is less emotionally informative than partitioning information, and is more important for arousal than for valence. Furthermore, we propose a novel set of phonetically-aware acoustic features, attaining significant improvements for valence (in particular) and arousal prediction across RECOLA, SEMAINE and CreativeIT respectively, compared with conventional reference acoustic features.

Response markers in Mandarin Chinese conversation : a corpus-based case study of shi, dui, xing, hao and the variants of shi

Phonological neighborhood effects have been found in spoken word recognition, word production and phonetic variation (Gahl, Yao, & Johnson, 2012; Luce & Pisoni, 1998; Vitevitch, 2002). Overall, words from dense neighborhoods are harder to recognize but easier to produce. However, most previous studies have focused on English, while evidence suggests that these effects may not generalize cross-linguistically due to language-specific configurations of the lexicon (Michael S Vitevitch & Stamer, 2006, 2009). In the current study, we investigate the effects of phonological neighborhoods in Mandarin Chinese, which has a vastly different lexicon structure from that of English. Results from an auditory lexical decision experiment showed that phonological neighborhood density and neighbor frequency (defined by the one-phoneme/tone difference rule) are predictive of the speed and accuracy of lexical decision. Homophone density also has a facilitative effect on the accuracy of lexical decision. The implications of the current findings are discussed in the framework of the lexicon model proposed by Zhou & Marslen-Wilson (1994, 2009).

Rhotic sounds are well known for their considerable phonetic variation within and across languages and their complexity in speech production. Although rhotics in many languages have been examined and documented, the phonetic features of Mandarin rhotics remain unclear, and debates about the prevocalic rhotic (the syllable-onset rhotic) persist. This paper extends the investigation of rhotic sounds by examining the articulatory and acoustic features of Mandarin Chinese rhotics in prevocalic, syllabic (the rhotacized vowel [ɚ]), and postvocalic (r-suffix) positions. Eighteen speakers from Northern China were recorded using ultrasound imaging. Results showed that Mandarin syllabic and postvocalic rhotics can be articulated with various tongue shapes, including tongue-tip-up retroflex and tongue-tip-down bunched shapes. Different tongue shapes have no significant acoustic differences in the first three formants, demonstrating a many-to-one articulation-acoustics relationship. The prevocalic rhotics in our data were found to be articulated only with bunched tongue shapes, and were sometimes produced with frication noise at the start. In general, rhotics in all syllable positions are characterized by a close F2 and F3, though the prevocalic rhotic has a higher F2 and F3 than the syllabic and postvocalic rhotics. The effects of syllable position and vowel context are also discussed.

While Mandarin Chinese varieties show notable syntactic differences, existing research has relied primarily on experiential reflection or corpus-based approaches, with a lack of data-driven investigations. This study presents a syntactically annotated corpus that includes Chinese Mainland Mandarin (CMM), Singapore Mandarin Chinese (SM), and Indonesian Mandarin Chinese (IM). Quantitative analyses of sentence length, dependency distance, and their distributions across the three Mandarin Chinese varieties demonstrate that: (1) average sentence length and mean dependency distance differ significantly across the three varieties. CMM shows the longest sentences and the highest mean dependency distance, SM occupies an intermediate position due to sustained Chinese education policies, and IM, shaped by historical discontinuities in Chinese education, ranks lowest on both measures; (2) the sentence length distributions of all three varieties conform to the Extended Positive Negative Binomial distribution, while their dependency distance distributions align with the right-truncated modified Zipf-Alekseev distribution, indicating shared cognitive mechanisms in language processing; (3) the distributional parameters of both quantitative linguistic models effectively distinguish the three Mandarin Chinese varieties, providing further support for the applicability of quantitative linguistic laws and their cross-linguistic typological universality. This study provides new approaches and perspectives for both Mandarin Chinese varieties and quantitative linguistics.

This paper introduces theDMC Corpus – a newly collected dataset of 150 mundane cell phone calls from Mainland China in Mandarin Chinese (audio and detailed transcripts) – which is now publicly available for use in research and teaching. In this report, we first describe the constitution and current contents of the DMC Corpus, as well as instructions for access. Additional calls will be added periodically to the Corpus, and so the quantitative overview presented here should be considered conservative. We then provide concrete examples of the sorts of phenomena that might be explored with these new data, underscoring how the Corpus offers researchers the ability to build systematic collections for analysis – no matter whether researchers prefer to begin with ‘forms’ (e.g., utterance-final particles), with ‘functions’ (e.g., complaining), and/or with the temporal organization of interaction itself (e.g., preference organization, repair). The paper concludes with an explicit call for increased research on Mandarin conversation, to which we hope the materials in the DMC Corpus will contribute.

This study examines Nǐ yìsi shì X ‘Your Meaning is X’ as a practice of doing other-initiation in Mandarin conversations, focusing on how it addresses different sources of troubles systematically in informing sequences. It is found that while ‘ Nǐ yìsi shì’ signals the speaker’s having trouble with the prior informing turn, ‘X’ is deployed to locate different aspects of the trouble source, being shaped by how an informing emerges in talk-in-interaction. Specifically, when following a volunteered informing, ‘ X’ is usually built to clarify specific words or phrases in preceding informing, thereby treating a certain element as underspecified or ambiguous. However, when following a question-solicited informing, ‘ X’ is typically constructed to work out what the provided information exactly conveys, indicating the whole informing turn/action is in some way problematic, inappropriate, or inapposite. In both cases, ‘ Nǐ yìsi shì X’ serves as an OI, working to target different kinds of the trouble source, and simultaneously proposes a potential solution to it.

This article provides an overview of the question-response system in Mandarin Chinese from a conversation analytic perspective. Based on 403 question-response sequences from natural conversations, this study discusses the grammatical coding of Mandarin questions, social actions accomplished by questions, and formats of responses. It documents three grammatical types of questions, that is, polar questions (including sub-types), Q-word questions, and alternative questions. These questions are shown to perform a range of social actions, confirmation request being the most frequent. Also, this article reveals that the preferred format for confirming polar answers is interjection, while that for disconfirming polar answers is repetition. It provides a starting point for future studies on Mandarin questions and responses as well as a reference point for further crosslinguistic comparison.

This article aims to explore the diachronic change and synchronic variation of passive constructions in Mandarin Chinese by combining the variationist sociolinguistic approach and the comparative method of historical linguistics. In particular, this study contributes to the literature on cross-linguistic grammaticalization by illustrating how Mandarin bei passives have evolved diachronically with possible respect to English. Based on 3,414 tokens of passive constructions from three comparable corpora across two significant time periods in Chinese linguistic history, the findings of our study reveal that the semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic constraints on the bei passive in modern Mandarin Chinese have changed significantly from the era in which there was no contact with English. The empirical methods used in our study (multivariate analysis and the quantitative comparison of various Chinese varieties) lend credence to our findings that change and variation of bei passives can be ascribed to the influence of English at least to a certain extent. Our results suggest that this cross-linguistic contact might have contributed to the grammaticalization of the morpheme bei as well as the process of passivization in Mandarin Chinese.