| This study investigates some of the tendencies and strategies in the use of the Chinese language, which has been increasingly recognized as a discourse-oriented language due to such characteristics as the fuzziness of sentence boundaries, topic prominence, frequent deletion of major sentence elements and meaning taking precedence over form in utterance organization. Drawing upon a combination of functional theories, this study is concerned with a number of prominent aspects of Chinese discourse, which include: (1) thematic structure, (2) information structure, and (3) word order. Data for this study consist of transcriptions of interviews with over 20 Mandarin-speaking informants in both institutional and non-institutional settings. Texts of three interviews, representing three basic discourse types--narrative, expository and procedural--are intensively examined and appended.;Thematic organization is described as a system of rules governing the selection and structuring of the themes of a discourse. In dealing with thematic structure in Chinese, emphasis is placed on the sentence-initial devices that are used by speakers to establish their point of departure and on the implications of thematic structure on the conceptual and cognitive processes of Chinese speakers.;Information structure concerns the distribution and organization of communicative information within and beyond the sentence. Linguistic utterances are conceived of as a message coding process susceptible to the speech context and the relation between the speaker and the listener. In discussing information structure, particular attention is paid to the sentence-final devices used by speakers to indicate the focus of their communicative interest. An important finding is that Chinese systematically abides by the principle of end-focus through a variety of dislocating devices.;The study of word order and word order permutation as a function of semantic and pragmatic meaning is directed toward the intra-sentential dynamism, which is governed by a number of principles. These are the principles of temporal sequence, scope and empathy. All of these principles suggest a strong and significant isomorphism between word order on the one hand and real-world events and human perception and concept ion on the other. |
