Inverted Sentences In Spoken Chinese--Case Analysis Of Beijing Conversational Discourse

Inverted sentences in modern Chinese are syntactic phenomena found exclusively in the conversational discourse. The previous studies of inverted sentences in spoken Chinese are mainly very brief descriptions about inverted sentences, and include no detailed analyses. The present study intends to explain the phenomena from some linguistic perspectives of pragmatics, discourse analysis, functional grammar, etc. The focus of the study is the relationship between Chinese grammar and the contextual environment.With the discussion of relationships among occurrences of inverted sentences in Beijing conversational discourse, their pragmatic motivations, and the emergent grammar, it is demonstrated that Chinese grammar is more flexible to pragmatic factors associated with communicative environments, including the speaker's communicative intents and discourse contexts. From the case of inverted sentences, we see that instead of relying on sentence-internal rules, Chinese depends heavily on pragmatic regulating factors as shown in the discussions of motivations behind the formation of inverted sentences.