Abstract
In some languages more than in others, communicative considerations—such as what a message is about, what information is new or old, and whether this or that participant is in the Speaker’s focus of attention—constrain the structure of a sentence. The goal of the present paper is to describe how different Semantic-Communicative Structures affect word order in simple mono-transitive sentences without coverbs or adverbial phrases in Mandarin Chinese. The discussion is couched in the Meaning-Text framework, relevant parts of which are clarified at the onset of the paper. We argue that Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) sentences are communicatively unmarked in that they do not signal any particular communicative consideration. Other word orders, however, specifically encode certain communicative considerations. This is the case of Prolepsisi-Subjecti-Verb-Object (PiSiVO) and Object-Subject-Verb (OSV) sentences, which are discussed here.
Highlights
It has been argued by a number of linguists, among others, Chao (1968), Hu (1995), LaPolla (1988, 1993, 1995), Li and Thompson (1975, 1976, 1989), Li (2005), and Van Valin and LaPolla (1997), that word order in Mandarin Chinese ( MC) is determined to a great extent by informational/communicative considerations
We argue that word order in MC is determined—among other things—by a number of different communicative considerations, which are called Semantic-Communicative-oppositions within the Meaning-Text Theory (Žolkovskij & Mel’čuk, 1967; Mel’čuk, 1988, 2001)
Theme-Rheme opposition is not sufficient to account for word order in MC, that is, the sentence-initial element in mono-transitive sentences can express the Theme or the Rheme
Summary
Received November 5th, 2012; revised December 4th, 2012; accepted December 11th, 2012. In some languages more than in others, communicative considerations—such as what a message is about, what information is new or old, and whether this or that participant is in the Speaker’s focus of attention—constrain the structure of a sentence. The goal of the present paper is to describe how different Semantic-Communicative Structures affect word order in simple mono-transitive sentences without coverbs or adverbial phrases in Mandarin Chinese. The discussion is couched in the Meaning-Text framework, relevant parts of which are clarified at the onset of the paper. Sentences are communicatively unmarked in that they do not signal any particular communicative consideration. This is the case of Prolepsisi-Subjecti-Verb-Object (PiSiVO) and Object-Subject-Verb (OSV) sentences, which are discussed here
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