DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF TEMPORAL MARKERS IN WRITTEN AND SPOKEN MANDARIN CHINESE: The Interaction of Semantics, Syntax, and Pragmatics

"Unlike previous research which is done with reference to only one linguistic level of analysis (i.e., syntax) and which uses invented example sentences to support analysis, Hsu's study uses an integrated approach and naturalistic data (written texts and transcribed speech) to examine the target forms in a broader context. . . . I believe that this monograph will be of interest to scholars in a wide range of fields, including syntax, semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, language pedagogy, cognitive linguistics, and corpus analysis. In sum, this monograph is original research of the highest quality." - Marianne Celce-Murcia

“This monograph has contributed significantly to our systematic understanding of the distribution of the Mandarin Chinese temporal markers ‘zheng’, ‘zhengzai’ and ‘zai’, which have traditionally been seen as largely synonymous or interchangeable. The author has demonstrated convincingly that the relevant factors underlying the distribution of these markers pertain to situation types and verb semantics, as well as to animacy and volitionality.. . . . has drawn attention to an important phenomenon in temporal encoding in Chinese, which has hitherto been neglected in previous literature. . . . Not only is the study of considerable theoretical interest to scholars interested in the structure of Chinese, but it is of great relevance to theoretical applied linguistics in the context of Chinese as a second language.” – Thomas Hun-tak lee