Traditionally, Chinese imperatives have been defined as sentences expressing a command (Chao 1968; Li & Thompson 1981; Sun 2006). Also, some scholars describe imperative sentences through the use of requests and politeness in Mandarin discourse (Lee-Wong 1994; Gao 1999; Qi & Zhu 2005). There is little research on imperatives in Mandarin interaction with the valuable exception of Rue & Zhang (2008), who analyze conversational data to uncover the function of Mandarin requests in a workplace interaction. To my knowledge, this research is the first study to focus on the use of imperatives in naturally occurring Mandarin conversation. The methodologies adopted for this research are Conversation Analysis (Drew 2005) and Interactional Linguistics (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting 2001).

Currently I have made a preliminary analysis of 46 minutes of video taped conversation between two native Mandarin speakers. 20 occurrences of imperative constructions have been identified. Imperative sentences occur in both initiating and responsive sequential positions (Schegloff, 2007). The imperatives in the data perform two types of actions: request for an immediate action (12 occurrences) and giving advice (8 occurrences). For example:

01 S: -> Ni    kan

             You look at

             Look

             (1.0)

02 L: En:::

         Mm

         Mm:::

        (1.0)

03 S: Hai     gei    ta      zuo     jianbing,

         Also   give  she   make   pancakes

         (They) also made pancakes for her                                                                            04     hai    pa    hule        na’er   kanzhe

         also  fear  be burnt  there   look at

         also being afraid of overcooked, (she had to wait) there to look after (pancakes)

        (2.0)

05 L: En:::

         Mm

         Mm:::

​

When S produces her imperative turn in line 01, she asks L to look at the screen of her phone. Speaker L responses both verbally with en (line 02) and nonverbally (head-turning and gazing at the screen) to S’s request. Then, Speaker S provides an explanation of the photo she is showing (line 03 and 04). This instance is a typical example of how imperatives are used as request for an immediate action in these data. I plan to expand my research to examine a larger data corpus, which will consist of 9 hours of face-to-face Mandarin conversation taking place in Beijing, China this summer. 

 

Key words: Mandarin conversation, imperative sentences, Conversation Analysis, interactional linguistics

 

 

References

Chao, Yuen Ren. A Grammar of Spoken Chinese. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1968, pp. 61-62.

Couper-Kuhlen, E. and Selting, M. “Introducing interactional linguistics”. Studies in Interactional Linguistics, Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2001, pp. 1-24.

Drew, P. Conversation analysis. In Handbook of Language and Social Interaction. Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005, pp. 71-102.

 Gao, Hong. “Features of request strategies in Chinese”. Working Papers, vol. 47, 1999, pp. 73-86.

Li, Charles N., and Sandra A. Thompson. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1981, pp. 451-462.

Lee-Wong, Song Mei. “Imperatives in Requests: Direct or Impolite - Observations from Chinese”. Pragmatics, vol. 4, 1994, pp. 491-515.

Schegloff, E. A. Sequence organization in Interaction: A primer in Conversation Analysis I. Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Sun, Chaofen. Chinese : A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2006, pp. 181-183.

Rue, Yong-Ju, and Zhang, Grace. Request Strategies : A Comparative Study in Mandarin Chinese and Korean. vol. 177, John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 2008, pp. 1-6, 33-46.

Qi, Hu Yang, and Zhu Min. “On the Selectivity of Modal Particles in Imperative Sentences in Modern Chinese”. Journal of Shanghai Normal University, vol. 34, 2005, pp. 62-69.