A Linguistic Analysis of Selected Morpho-syntactic Features of Spoken Mandarin

Abstract

This dissertation carries out a linguistic analysis of three selected morpho-syntactic features of Modern Standard Chinese using a corpus of spoken data. It aims to contribute to a better understanding of Mandarin Chinese grammar by making two quite different contributions to the body of research. Firstly, it provides a reconceptualised analysis of the existing literature on morpho-syntactic language change in Modern Standard Chinese, which is presented both diagrammatically and in textual form. The reconceptualisation of previous findings reveals some important and interesting correlations and connections that were not immediately obvious from the existing literature, owing to the disparate and ad hoc nature in which they have often been presented. It is hoped that a flow-on effect of this unified classification schema will be to encourage a more systematic, organised and manageable approach to conducting and reporting on future research into Chinese morpho-syntactic language change. The second contribution is a detailed grammatical analysis of selected morpho-syntactic features of Mandarin Chinese, which is carried out using a corpus of spoken data assembled especially for the purposes of this research. The corpus consists of transcripts of the chat show ‘A Date with Luyu’ broadcast between January and September 2011, and totals over 500,000 characters in size.