Papers by Miao-Hsia Chang
Discourse Functions of Anne in Taiwanese Southern Min
Concentric： Studies in Linguistics, Jun 1, 2002
This study investigates the use of anne in spontaneous Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM) conversations... more This study investigates the use of anne in spontaneous Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM) conversations. The analysis is based on a 2-hour corpus of spoken TSM. The results have demonstrated the descent of anne from a lexical element to a textual or interactional element on the one hand, and a semantically void particle on the other. Within the clause level, it
The Effects of Instruction on Chinese University Students' Productions of Complaint Behaviors in American English
Taiwan Journal of TESOL, 2010
This paper reports on efficacy of instruction in L2 complaints in an EFL classroom. There were ei... more This paper reports on efficacy of instruction in L2 complaints in an EFL classroom. There were eighty participants in this study, with two native groups (American and Chinese) serving as baseline groups, and two Chinese learner groups (high and low-proficiency) as experimental ...
Discourse Strategies in Oral Presentation
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Concentric. Studies in Linguistics, 2021
This study aims to examine the subtypes of directives and their realization patterns in Taiwanese... more This study aims to examine the subtypes of directives and their realization patterns in Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM). The data were drawn from a play script corpus published in the 20th century. Nine directive subtypes were identified: advice, begging, invitation, order, offer, request, suggestion, urge, and warning. The realization patterns were analyzed in terms of the main components in the directives: alerter, discourse marker, politeness marker, subject, modal expression, verb phrase, and utterance final particle. The analysis reveals a number of features: (1) Alerters mainly take the form of an address term; (2) Utterance-initial discourse markers are mainly realized by tan ‘now’; (3) The subject is either hearer-dominated or speaker- and hearer-dominated, with the latter expressing solidarity in casual situations; (4) the politeness marker chhiáⁿ tends to take an overt subject; (5) The modal verb tio̍h accounts for the majority of subtypes; (6) The dominant verb types include...
Taiwan journal of linguistics, 2018
American and Chinese Complaints
This study examines the discourse-pragmatic functions of the distal demonstrative HE ‘that’ and i... more This study examines the discourse-pragmatic functions of the distal demonstrative HE ‘that’ and its functional equivalents in Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM) conversation. The analysis shows that an overwhelming proportion of HE tokens are used to denote a referent that is assumed by the speaker to be identifiable based on community knowledge, shared background knowledge, inference, or evoked information. Such uses are argued to emerge from the negotiation of the meaning of the referent via the interactional contexts (cf. Tao 1999; Huang 2013). They signify the speaker’s belief toward the hearer regarding the identifiability of the referent in the process of information exchanging and negotiating. The marking of a referent with HE brings the NP at issue to an activated state which then serves as the focal point of interest in the succeeding exchange of talk. Meanwhile, the speaker might convey an emotional tone or viewpoint distancing from the referent. The major uses of HE mark NPs th...
International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 2019
The present study aimed to examine the speech act of correction produced by Chinese, Americans, a... more The present study aimed to examine the speech act of correction produced by Chinese, Americans, and Chinese EFL learners. A total of 120 participants were asked to fill in a questionnaire with two major parts: a Scaled Response Questionnaire (SRQ) and a Discourse Completion Task (DCT). Elicited data were analyzed in terms of three perspectives: perception of face-threat, overall correction strategy use, and the use of external modifications. The results showed some similarities and differences between Chinese and Americans’ corrections. As for the EFL learners, they exhibited their interlanguage development in the perception and overall strategy use. In addition, instances of L1 pragmatic transfer were found in the learners’ use of some individual strategies and external modifications. Learners’ interlanguage development and L1 socio-cultural transfer demonstrated the multi-competence of the learners. The present study suggests that further instruction should be implemented to enric...
Two counter-expectation markers in Chinese
Metaphor and Metonymy across Time and Cultures, 2015
This study investigates the emergence and diachronic development of two markers of counter-expect... more This study investigates the emergence and diachronic development of two markers of counter-expectation (CE) in Chinese: sha4 ‘evil spirit’ and jieguo ‘to yield fruit’. The markers are compared with their counterparts in Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM), soah and kiatko. The results show that sha4 ‘evil spirit’ emerged in the 7th century as an alternate form of sha1 ‘to kill’. Through metaphorical and metonymic changes, it evolved to include senses associated with suppression, destroying, and intensification. After the 11th century, it further evolved to have a concessive and CE sense in the predicate-initial position. The CE meaning is also pervasive in contemporary TSM soah. Jieguo emerged as a compound of jie and guo through reanalysis. Later, through the process of metaphorical change, its meaning was extended to ‘end; result’, used as either a noun or verb. On the other hand, the intransitive jieguo was transitivized to a verb of killing in the 14th century. In modern Chinese, it further underwent metonymic change and was reanalyzed as a linking adverbial indicating counter-expectation in contemporary Chinese. An identical use is observed in contemporary TSM. The evolutions and changes of sha4 and jieguo in the history of Chinese are indicative of the effect of metaphor and metonymy on the semanticization and adverbialization of a verbal morpheme from a content word to a highly grammaticalized sentential adverb in different Chinese dialects. An understanding of the evolution of meaning can only be achieved by a close scrutiny of the situated meanings and communicative functions of the two forms in context.
Do Chinese Students Waffle in Their Apologies?: An Exploration into EFL Learners’ Emails
Email Discourse Among Chinese Using English as a Lingua Franca, 2015
This study aims to investigate whether the “waffle” phenomenon is revealed in EFL learners’ apolo... more This study aims to investigate whether the “waffle” phenomenon is revealed in EFL learners’ apology emails in an academic context. A total of 60 students participated in this study. They comprised three groups of undergraduate students: 20 native proficient speakers of English (PSEs), 20 Chinese EFL learners (EFLCs), and 20 proficient speakers of Chinese (PSCs). The results demonstrate both generality and specificity in language users’ apology realizations. The generality is indicated by all the participants’ preference for “Direct Apology,” “Account,” “Taking on Responsibility,” and “Offers of Repair.” Specificity is noticeable in the waffling of the “Account” strategy by EFLCs. The findings shed light on the importance of explicit instruction of the pragmalinguistic features and the sociocultural values accepted in the target culture, and in the case of the current study, formality and conciseness of the language.
Journal of Pragmatics, 2012
The present study investigates the discourse-pragmatic functions of the causal marker inui in Tai... more The present study investigates the discourse-pragmatic functions of the causal marker inui in Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM) conversation and compares them with unmarked causal utterances. It also explores the intonation patterning and distribution of overt and non-overt causal utterances in TSM. The functions of inui are categorized into five types: (1) pure-cause marking, (2) explanation marking, (3) justification marking, (4) understanding display, and (5) information interpolation. Among them, the information-interpolating function characterizes inui as a non-causal logical connector. The analysis shows that inui is interactively driven and used to achieve social comity. It is employed particularly when a speaker recognizes the need to provide the addressee with a better and friendlier ground for conversation in order to avoid face threat, to resolve a trouble of talk, or to fill an information gap. The occurrence of inui is sensitive to seriousness of topics, the social relation between interlocutors, and the speaker's attitude to the topic of talk. When the speech situation does not call for an explicitly marked account, inui is not used. The lower frequency of inui compared with that of English because and Mandarin yinwei in conversation data further corroborates the interactive nature of inui. As for the positioning and intonation patterning, the results conform to previous findings, i.e., causal clauses tend to occur after the materials they modify.
Intercultural Pragmatics, 2011
Complaining has been an under-represented speech act in cross-cultural pragmatics. Unlike the wel... more Complaining has been an under-represented speech act in cross-cultural pragmatics. Unlike the well-defined speech acts such as apologizing, requesting, and complimenting, complaining is comparatively more complex in that it has no predetermined forms and the interpretations are often negotiable. In this study 1 , a total of 40 American and Taiwanese university students were recruited and asked to fill out a discourse completion test (DCT) containing eight complaint-provoking scenarios. The DCT was employed as the major instrument because it elicits the most critical part of the speech act under investigation and allows for cross-cultural comparisons. Six complaint strategies (opting out, interrogation, accusation, request for repair, and threat) were identified and analyzed in terms of their overall and combined use across the eight scenarios. The quantitative results indicated that the American and the Chinese participants shared similar distributions in both overall and combined strategy use. The qualitative findings, however, showed differences in their choice of linguistic forms and expression of semantic content. Such similarities and differences are then discussed from the universality/culturespecificity perspective.
Response Tokens in MSN Conversations
Concentric: Studies in Linguistics, 2009
... B: Shi o! RT 'Is that so?' (4) A: Wo gen ni shuo o! Mojie hao nankan. 1SG with 2SG ... more ... B: Shi o! RT 'Is that so?' (4) A: Wo gen ni shuo o! Mojie hao nankan. 1SG with 2SG say PAR PN very bad .look ... (5) A: Wo tongxue kan le Zhuluoji san. 1SG classmate see PAR Jurassic.Park three Tingshuo bi dier ji hao kan ye. hear.say COMP second episode good see PAR ...
The Information Sequences of Adverbial Clauses in Written Chinese Discourse
Selected papers from the Fifth …, 2000
Teaching Chinese Metadiscourse in University Lectures: The Case of Jiushi (就是)
Chinese Language Learning Sciences, 2019
Studies have shown that metadiscourse plays a crucial role in comprehension, cohesion, and cohere... more Studies have shown that metadiscourse plays a crucial role in comprehension, cohesion, and coherence of academic discourse. The study analyzed 450 min of academic lectures and identified three major metadiscourse functions of jiushi: intensification, elaboration, and pause filler. Intensification is further delineated as exclusiveness, concession, conditionality, and contrast, and elaborative use as reformulation and exemplification. We also provide a review and analysis of errors in the use of jiushi by learners of Chinese. Based on the results of analysis, material design for teaching the intensifying jiushi and classroom activities for teaching the elaborative and filler jiushi are proposed. It is hoped that this study elucidates both teaching and learning Chinese metadiscourse in academic settings.
A corpus-based study of the recurrent lexical bundle ka li kong ‘let (me) tell you’ in Taiwanese Southern Min conversations
Chinese Language and Discourse, 2017
This paper investigates the most frequent lexical bundle (LB) ka li kong (to-you-say) (KLK), in a... more This paper investigates the most frequent lexical bundle (LB) ka li kong (to-you-say) (KLK), in an 18.5-hour Taiwanese Southern Min conversation corpus. The analysis focuses on the discourse-pragmatic functions of KLK, the role it plays in the speaker’s management of information in talk-in-interaction, and the collocations that are employed. The results show that the speaker utilizes KLK to imply epistemic authority regarding the veracity of the predication. Meanwhile, it expresses the speaker’s stance or functions as a discourse organizer to initiate a narrative that is newsworthy. Prosodically, it is always processed as a holistic chunk with great phonological reduction. Along with the low transitivity of the verb kong demonstrated by the type of object it takes, we argue that KLK is developing into a discourse marker. Collocation of KLK with the marker toh further triggers the grammaticalization of the four-word bundle toh ka li kong (TKLK) to encode an extreme stance.
Hedges can be used to show a speaker's less than full commitment to the truth of a proposition in... more Hedges can be used to show a speaker's less than full commitment to the truth of a proposition in spoken discourse or to strengthen an author's argument in academic discourse. Attribution hedges are hedges used by writers to qualify their claims by relating their arguments to a given source of information. This paper explores authorial stance in attribution hedges in Chinese academic discourse and their disciplinary variation. The disciplines investigated include the pure humanities, the social sciences and the hard sciences. The results show that writers in the pure humanities and social sciences use more attribution hedges in their writing. Furthermore, these writers reveal a greater tendency to use subjective accounts when they seek support for their claims, with social sciences writers reflecting a lesser degree of subjectivity. Specifically, writing in the pure humanities is characterized by hedges which display more individuality and which involve readers in the argument. Hard sciences writers, by contrast, reflect an objective stance with attribution hedges that imply the authors detachment from the argument. In short, pure humanities writing reveals a rhetorical style that is closer to interactively oriented spoken register. The incorporation of more informal elements may arise from the uncertain nature of findings in the pure humanities, where claims or propositions are mainly based on subjective evaluation or interpretation of data.
This paper aims to delve into the developmental path of two volition verbs and to show that movem... more This paper aims to delve into the developmental path of two volition verbs and to show that movements of V-to-I and I-to-C/V-to-C have been diachronically occurring in two dialects/languages that are often categorized under the same generic term Chinese. The two volition verbs involve beh "to want" in Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM) and yao "to want" in Mandarin Chinese. In investigating diachronic data of classical Chinese, we will show these two verbs have been undergoing a process of categorical change and resulting in polysemy in the synchronic dimension. Both beh and yao can behave like a main verb, a modal auxiliary (expressing obligation and desire), a future marker, and a conditional marker. Since beh in Southern Min has evolved almost identical functions with those of yao in Mandarin by the 16 th century, it is not plausible to assume that the Southern Min beh derives phonologically or semantically from the Mandarin yao or even from a literary form yu "to want" (cf. Tung, 1998). In fact, the literary yu can only function as a main verb or a future marker. Thus, this study will show that two etymologically unrelated forms, beh and yao, have displayed an almost identical path of change, and that this change can be well explained by a syntactic verb-movement occurring in a diachronic dimension.
This paper investigates the diachrony of the verbs of volition ai and beh in Southern Min (SM). T... more This paper investigates the diachrony of the verbs of volition ai and beh in Southern Min (SM). The data include historical SM texts (16 th-19 th century), folk songs in the late 19 th to early 20 th century, and contemporary natural Taiwanese Southern Min conversations. The results mainly mark two stages of the development of ai and beh: historical (before 1900) and contemporary SM. Since the 16 th century (Ming Dynasty), ai has been used as a verb of volition indicating love, intention or hope. As for historical ai, it marked future, specialized however for predicting an adverse future. In contemporary SM, a sense of necessity emerged with the use of ai denoting general agreement among people. Seven senses are attributed to historical beh: want/intention/hope, future, excessiveness, necessity, proximity and conditionality. In contemporary SM, the indication of the want of an entity has become a less preferred use, and necessity is only preserved when indicating puzzlement and help...
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Papers by Miao-Hsia Chang