A Study Of Third-person Compound Referential Expressions And Their Discourse Functions In Chinese Spontaneous Conversation

Third-person compound reference,a kind of personal deixis,is an interesting and thought-provoking linguistic phenomenon.In Chinese,as a combination of noun phrases(hereafter Np)and/or pronoun phrases(hereafter Pp),both referring to the third person(s),the third-person compound referential expressions(hereafter TCREs)exhibit richer or more versatile linguistic features than the corresponding single referring expressions.They cannot merely refer to the third person(s),but also reflect or reveal language users' subjective meanings(or discourse stance).To be more exact,that language users employ the TCREs is an attempt to express their subjective meanings or construct their discourse stances.Based on the above understanding or reflections,we have firstly made a systematic description of the TCRE from the syntactic,semantic and discourse perspectives which can be divided into the following eight specific aspects-structure categories,syntactic locations,grammatical roles,semantic relations between every two immediate constituents,semantic focus,assignment and properties of the focus,discourse points of view and discourse functions,aiming at a comprehensive understanding of such compound referential expressions as TCREs.After this systematic description,and with an annotation scheme according to the three major representational systems on the structural,semantic and discourse levels and their eight corresponding sub-systems,we have annotated by hand a corpus of spoken Chinese collected from the real-life spontaneous conversations.-Afterwards,a quantitative analysis has been undertaken to investigate the general distribution of TCREs as represented on the structural,semantic and discourse levels in our data.And finally,with a view to the stance-related discourse functions of TCREs,we have combined the theories of conversation analysis(CA)and the stance triangle,which was put forward by Du Bois(2002a,2002b,2007),to dynamically demonstrate the speaker's illocutionary intension to choose TCREs in the conversation.In the order of their percentage each category has taken,two categories of two-component TCREs-"Pp + Np"(PpNp)and "Np + Pp"(NpPp)-have been screened out for more discussions on their stance-related discourse functions.Herein an emphasis has been placed upon how these two categories,in topic-introducing and topic-maintaining turns respectively,could help the speaker with his/her evaluation(s)on the stance object(s)and meanwhile with affective positioning toward him-/herself.From a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses of TCREs in our corpus,major research findings have been derived and are listed as follows:1.In our corpus of spontaneous conversation,all TCRE categories vary from one another with their frequency,and among the four categories of two-component TCREs and the eight categories of three-or-more-component ones,category PpNp occurs most frequently after which comes category NpPp.2.These categories,being of two-component TCREs or of three-or-more-component ones,firstly tend to function syntactically as subjects,then as objects and thirdly as topics.On the semantic level,the semantic focuses of TCREs are mostly front-weight and functionally assigned,and the majority of the components carrying semantic focuses are[+designated].3.On the discourse level,our study has shown thatFirstly,TCREs are of two major points of view-narrative and ideological.Being of two-component or of three-or-more-component TCREs,most categories are of mixed points of view of unitary person(i.e.,third person)and ideology rather than those of binary persons(i.e.,first and third persons,or second and third persons)and ideology.But whether a TCRE is of mixed points of view of ideology and unitary person or of those of ideology and binary persons seems to be determined by the part-of-speech of its components,so that for the two-component TCREs,category PpNp and category dPp(short for double pronoun phrases)both tend to be of mixed points of view,of ideology and unitary person,.while category NpPp and category dNp(short for double noun phrases)indicate no obvious tendency in the mixed points of view,which could be of ideology and unitary person and of ideology,and binary persons.Secondly,on the whole,TCREs could help firstly to adjust the discourse information structure(DIS)through increasing or decreasing the amount of semantic information contained in the preceding component and adding pragmatic information usually by the subsequent component,secondly to regulate the ongoing pragmatic distance(OPD)through widening or narrowing the psychological and emotional distance between the speaker and the referent,and thirdly to maintain the discourse coherence(DC).(a)In terms of adjusting DIS,besides adding pragmatic information,TCREs tend to increase the amount of semantic information contained in the preceding component.(b)with respect to regulating OPD,TCREs reveal the speaker's intention:firstly widening OPD between him-/herself and the referent,achieving the mental and emotional congeniality with it,and thus highlighting his/her stance toward it,and secondly narrowing OPD between him-/herself and the referent so as to mitigate the illocutionary force(IF)of face-threatening speech acts(FSA)which target at it.(c)with regard to maintaining DC,TCREs not only play the roles of anaphoric reference and topic maintenance,but also achieve coherence throughout the utterance in the current session through regulating OPD between the speaker and the referent,thereby eliciting or displaying his/her stance toward it.Thirdly,taken individually,TCREs of category PpNp tend to distance the speaker from the referent mentally and emotionally,and subsequently to highlight his/her stance toward the referent,while those of category NpPp mainly play the role of narrowing OPD between the speaker and the referent,thereby the former achieving the mental and emotional congeniality with the latter and mitigating IF of FSA which target at it.These two categories of two-component TCREs being utterly different in their discourse functions,but in case of such two sub-functions of discourse stance as evaluations on the referent and the speaker's affective self-positioning,they turn out to be largely identical but with slight differences in miscellaneous turns in conversations,which can be summed up as follows:(a)Both TCREs of category PpNp and of category NpPp tend primarily to elicit or reveal in topic-maintaining turns the speaker's negative evaluations on the referent and his/her negative affective self-positioning,but by contrast,the speaker prefers TCREs of category PpNp to those of category NpPp.(b)Again more often in topic-maintaining turns,TCREs of category PpNp and of category NpPp are both applied to motivated discourse stance-the speaker's positive evaluations on the referent and his/her positive affective self-positioning.However,what's more favored once again is the former category instead of the latter one.(c)Taking(a)and(b)together,we can find that the speaker is more apt to select and use TCREs of category PpNp to voice his/her discourse stance,whether motivated or not,but that when voicing a mixed discourse stance,i.e.,positive evaluations blended with negative affective self-positioning or vice versa,no significance is found between these two categories.(d)A further investigation into our corpus has disclosed that the TCREs' tendency to voice negative discourse stance is ascribed to the interpersonal relationship in that both TCREs of category PpNp and of category NpPp occurr more frequently in conversations between participants of equal social status or between speakers of higher social status and referents or hearers of lower one.Additionally,this tendency is positively related to the Third Person's lower empathy value than the First or Second Person's.The above findings lead us to propose that it is for the communicative intention to reveal or demonstrate his/her subjective meanings or stance that the speaker selects and uses such compound referential expressions as TCREs instead of the corresponding single ones.This study,therefore,has taken one step further toward ourunderstanding of the linguistic phenomenon of appositives and compound personal deixis(CPD).Additionally,CA has gone along with the stance triangle in our analysis of the TCREs in spontaneous conversations in modern Mandarin,which will facilitate further study of CPD and/or of discourse stance in Chinese discourse.