On Chinese Discourse Le
The particle le is one of the most elusive elements in Chinese grammar. Viewing discourse as social interaction in a pragmatic functional framework, a joint NWO (the Dutch National Science Council) project, undertaken by Dr Marinus van den Berg and Dr Guo Wu, has produced a number of findings concerning the particle and its discourse function, and this new approach itself has theoretical implications.By Guo Wu
The particle leis one of the more frequently used and discussed, but least understood, elements in Chinese grammar. Whileleregularly features in everyday discourse, traditional studies have focused mainly on its role in the sentence without paying adequate attention to the interactive social context in which it is used. The collaborative research project 'On Chinese Discourse Le', undertaken by Marinus van den Berg and Guo Wu is an effort to approach this old problem from a new perspective. The overall goal of the project is to develop a pragmatic, functional framework which will allow for the description and explanation of the various functions of the particle lein an interactive context. The approach can then be extended to other particles and various grammatical processes employed by the Chinese language so as to produce 'A Chinese Discourse Grammar'.Theoretical framework
This project has developed a discourse model on the basis of discourse as social interaction and linguistic forms as clues and cues for the cognitive construction of the situation and ultimate understanding of discourse. It rejects sentence logic and holds that 'there are many important things about language that can never be understood by constructing sequences of words that begin with John and end with a period, and asking oneself whether or not they are sentences…' (Chafe 1994:8). As revealed by studies in mental spaces: 'Expressions do not mean; … the words themselves say nothing independent of the richly detailed knowledge and powerful cognitive processes we bring to bear' (Turner 1991:206). Therefore, to understand a piece of discourse is to apply in context the partial grammatical instructions provided by its linguistic form to reconstruct the situation, and make an appropriate response to it. And in order to reconstruct the situation one needs to activate selectively his/her knowledge on the typifications of everyday situations to fill in the gaps between the linguistic clues and cues.
Situational changes
Chinese discourse particle le, as treated in the project, typically represents such a cue, which serves as an indicator of situational changes to the addressee and a signal for him/her to react to it accordingly. The signal is very partial and underspecified. It may be used in situations where the event involved is going to start, or has started, or has finished and the event may be habitual or specific. When isolated, a le sentence may be ambiguous in many ways, but there is no confusion in context - the signal is contextually efficient. The project argues that the essence ofleis inchoativity. It is from this inchoative meaning that le's function of indicating a currently relevant state has derived. By signalling the inception of a state in a sentence-final position,leeffectively asserts the current existence of that state at the speech or a certain reference time. And the very fact that the speaker chooses to useleto point to a certain state of affairs as emerging in an ever-changing world reflects the speaker's intent in communication and implies relevance between what he says and the situation.
The project distinguishes two categories of changes signalled by le: objective and subjective. The former involves circumstances, or participants, or states of affairs, whereas the latter is related to the speaker's attitudes, beliefs, or mental processes. As objective changes are more easily recognized, the project especially examined subjective changes and subdivided them into five types: a) deviation from what is normal and usual; b) deviation from what is believed or assumed in the situation; c) new or present realization of the situation; d) variables in a situation; and e) subjective changes in time. While objective changes typically involve changes between different time points in reality, subjective changes, in general, reflect the differences between a state of affairs in reality and that in the speaker's mental world. The extended use of the particle lefrom indicating objective changes to subjective ones is in agreement with the tendencies proposed by Traugott of the main path of semantic changes: 'from external described situation to internal described situation', and towards becoming 'increasingly based on the speaker's subjective belief state'.
The discourse function of le
The project reveals that the particle le, interacting with the information status of the content of le sentence, has a line-development function in discourse. A le sentence opens a line when it initiates a sequence of discourse acts by drawing the addressee's attention to a certain change in the situation. An opening le sentence necessarily carries new information, i.e. the change is new to the addressee. It is a signal to the addressee either to do something to respond to the situation, or hold his/her turn for more information to come. When the bulk of the information in a le sentence has been given, it may close a line, or a sequence of discourse acts either by summarizing the previous discourse, or by bringing the discourse back to the present scene to wind up one's turn. In the former case, the le sentence is often evaluative since the content itself is somehow already given and the shift of discourse orientation to an evaluation mode effectively invites the addressee's opinion. In the latter case, the le sentence points to a state of affairs that is either already active in the situation, or represents a temporal closure of activities according to our knowledge of the real world, signaling to the addressee to take on his/her turn or to prepare for a topic shift.
Le's opening and closing function lies in its function as a proximal deictic. By relating a certain state of affairs to the speech time,lebrings the discourse back to the present interaction, or the speech theatre, effectively closing the established discourse world. The closure of the previous discourse world where some change happened, meanwhile, marks the inception of the state of affairs resulting from that change. The two different functions are, in fact, the two sides of the same coin. The closing le sentence is 'backward looking' and reacts to the foregoing discourse, creating the space for turn or topic shift, while the opening le sentence is 'forward looking', allowing the space for elaboration or the addressee's reaction.
Sentence-completing function
The interactive perspective and the particle's core meaning and discourse functions established by the project have shed light on the so-called sentence-completing function, which the particle lehas traditionally been claimed to have. In fact, the term is misleading as if there were sentences out of context. In our view, the so-called independent sentences are those that contain, explicitly or implicitly, all the necessary elements of a situation: the event, participants, and circumstances. They can stand alone only in the sense they provide enough clues for the construction of the situation in which they occur, but not in the sense they may be used out of context. The fact thatlecan always make an awkward V-le O sentence sound natural is because the particle's link with the present (or a reference) time provides vital information about the setting of the situation, which is exactly what the V-le O pattern lacks.
Significance
From a perspective that combines functional and cognitive grammar, the project has made a number of findings concerning the core meaning of the particle and its discourse functions that lead to in-depth understanding of how the Chinese particle leoperates: when, how, and under what circumstances it is used and its implications and social functions when used in specific situations. The same approach may be applied to the analysis of other particles of Chinese to explore their functions in social interactions, and the results of these studies would provide more data for situation-marking in Chinese. A systematic treatment of such markings would not only advance our understanding of Chinese, but also contribute to typological studies of languages in general. Furthermore, the approach adopted in the project that has merged grammar and pragmatics harmoniously by recognizing the role of our knowledge and cognitive operations in discourse processing is of far-reaching significance beyond the studies of the particle le, or of Chinese grammar, with methodological implications.
References
Chafe, Wallace. 1994. Discourse, consciousness, and time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Fauconnier, Gilles. 1997. Mappings in thought and language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Li, Charles N. & Sandra A. 1981. Mandarin Chinese: A functional reference grammar. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Traugott, E. C. 1982. From propositional to textual and expressive meanings: some semantic-pragmatic aspects of grammaticalisation. In Perspectives on historical linguistics. Eds. W. P.
Turner, M. 1991. Reading minds. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Van Dijk, T. 1997. Ed. Discourse as social interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Press.
Dr Guo Wu, a Chinese linguist, is attached to the University of Western Sydney Nepean, Australia. He was an IIAS Affiliated Fellow from July to January 1999. E-mail address: g.wu@uws.edu.au.