| This dissertation is a study of the general differences, organizational, lexical, and syntactical, between spoken and written Mandarin narrative discourse. It also examines the aspect system in Mandarin, particularly with regards to perfectivity and inchoativity and how they function in narrative discourse. The data for this study consisted of twenty narratives, ten spoken and ten written, all based on the "pear" film produced at the University of California at Berkeley.It was found that syntactic marking in general was more prevalent in spoken narratives than in written narratives. Written narratives were longer, had more complex phrase structures, longer more complex attributive clauses, few coordinating words, a sprinkling of literary vocabulary, and prevalent use of both third-person pronouns and zero anaphora. Spoken narratives, on the other hand, were shorter, used a variety of coordinating words, had syntactically simple clauses, high occurrence of third-person pronouns and NP repetition, with few zero anaphora, had short, simple attributive clauses and a higher frequency of perfective and inchoative aspect markers.It was shown that the perfective aspect plays a significant and important role in narrative discourse. A zero aspect was also proposed to account for times when a perfective or imperfective aspect marker is absent in a clause but when an aspectual meaning is implied by the context.Resultative verb complements were the most productive means to indicate perfectivity in both modes of discourse followed by post-verbal perfective le and finally verb reduplication.This study has shown that there are considerable differences between spoken and written discourse in Mandarin Chinese. Furthermore, it has provided a broader view of the aspect system in Mandarin by examining syntactic, semantic, and contextual features of the system. |
