Keynote speakers 会议主讲嘉宾

This study examines two grammatical forms used for requests for immediate actions in Mandarin face-to-face interaction: the VP imperative form ‘Do X’ and the ni ‘you’-imperative form ‘You do X’. The former is composed of a bare VP ‘Do X’, and the latter consists of a second person pronouns ni (‘you’ singular) or nimen (‘you’ plural) followed by a VP: ni(men)+VP ‘You do X’. An examination of 10 hours of everyday Mandarin face-to-face interactional data shows that mutual visual orientation and embodied participation framework between participants is relevant to the speaker’s selection between the two imperative forms for requests. This study demonstrates that grammar and body are symbiotic and an integral whole in interaction.

The relationship between linguistic units and talk-in-interaction has long been the concern of students of language and interaction, and substantial progress has been made in the past decades. For example, in their seminal work on turn taking in conversation, Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (SSJ, 1974) have already drawn attention to the importance of referencing to turn taking (or turn-in-a-series) for a proper understanding of the syntax of sentences. Discourse functional linguists, on the other hand, have tended to focus on prosodic and structural units as the basis for theorizing. In this presentation, I will attempt to explore a novel concept of UNITS FOR INTERACTION (UFI) to shed light on materials and ways that parties at talk operate with in conducting interaction. In doing so, I will raise questions about the relationship between discourse and grammar. I will illustrate the concept of UFI with audio/video recorded everyday conversations from Mandarin Chinese and English. The data types to be discussed include 1) non-lexical vocalizations; 2) alternation patterns of complex constructions; and 3) large constructions (such as lists) involving multiple speaker changes.    

Linguistic dramas are verbal expressions that describe striking events and express intense emotions. They are ubiquitous in everyday communication. Since the introduction of the concept of "dramatized discourse", research on linguistic drama in Chinese has advanced significantly.

In this presentation I delve deeper into the cognitive-affective mechanisms of linguistic drama. To do so, I introduce the concept of "grammatical surprise", which, I argue, results from the creative and often intentional violation of linguistic conventions within a language community. These conventions govern our linguistic behavior and how we process others' linguistic behavior are integral to our cognitive schemas. Using examples from Chinese, English, and German, I show that grammatical surprise arises when speakers push the limits of local syntactic rules and collocational conventions under language-specific morphosyntactic constraints.

The concept of grammatical surprise draws from the psychology of surprise, a basic emotion that arises from "prediction errors" in information processing. Consistent with the widely accepted insight that language is an integral part of our cognitive affective capacity, I contend that grammatical surprise is rooted in the affective and bodily experience of surprise. Following from this, I make the case that the construct of grammatical surprise provides a cognitive-affective account of linguistic drama as a fundamentally embodied phenomenon.

 Keywords: linguistic drama, grammatical surprise, embodiment, affect

北京话里，第一人称复数“我们、咱们”的功能有所扩展，在主语位置上，却不指称包括言者的行为人；在名词修饰语位置上，不用作指别“哪一个”。这类用法见于操作语体现场演示对话，言者希望受话人关注当下的行为或者现场的事物，与互动行为类型高度关联。事实上，第一、第二和第三人称代词都有不同程度的功能扩展，从专指到非专指，进而“去指称化”，其功能解读是在特定互动行为中浮现的。新的语法的出现，是语用限制逐步松绑，从局限于某个特定的语体（应用场景）到较少语体限制。因此，对语法形式在不同互动场景用法的观察、刻画它在言语互动中的语用条件，助于说明语法演化的动因。