Studies on Chinese Discourse Grammar by Fang Mei

Studies on Chinese Discourse Grammar by Fang Mei

This book extends the traditional research perspective of single sentences and contexts to the textual structure of real discourse materials.

Taking discourse functional grammar as its theoretical orientation, the book combines relevant theories with Chinese practice to work on a number of topics, including discourse phenomena and syntactic integration, the information status and discourse function of special syntactic structures, the emergence of discourse functions of metadiscourse components, and stylistic differences and their syntactic manifestations. Syntactic-semantic laws and discourse functions are examined in relation to each other, which better reveals their inner connection; a focus on the shaping of grammatical structures by interactional factors brings to light the functional motivations behind grammatical rules. In contrast to traditional Chinese grammar research, which takes individual simple or complex sentences as the object of study, this book mainly analyses grammatical phenomena that span sentences. By broadening the scope of research, it enables further exploration of issues that are difficult to address satisfactorily at the sentence level, thus enriching the study of Chinese grammar.

The book will be of great interest to students and scholars of interactional linguistics, Chinese linguistics and functional grammar.

FANG Mei is a Professor at the Institute of Linguistics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. She is currently the deputy editor-in-chief of Studies of the Chinese Language (中国语文) and the vice-president of Chinese Language Society. She has been working on Chinese grammar and discourse analysis with the functional approach, focusing on the emergent nature of grammatical patterns, pragmaticalization, and grammar in interaction.