Similarly, the sentence can be further reduced to chengli you shi where chengli, (in town), becomes the topic. Hockett’s example of this is:Īs Hockett points out, the topic wo can be deleted leaving the sentence Jintian chengli you shi where, in Hockett’s view, jintian now becomes the topic. In this way, a Chinese sentence can be built up of predications within predications. In discussing Chinese, however, Hockett points out that many Chinese comments themselves consist of both a topic and a comment. “The speaker announces a topic and then says something about it” (201). Some sixty years ago, Hockett suggested that topic and comment constructions generally characterise the immediate constituents (ICs) of these constructions. Here we argue that the topic-comment structure is also linked to the modifier-modified sequence commonly seen in Chinese. The Sentence: Topic-comment and/or modifier-modified.Ī fundamental principle of organisation in Chinese is contained in the topic-comment construction, although, subject-predicate sentences are also common. Later we shall consider how rhetorical organisation in Chinese has been influenced by Western contact. Implicit in all this will be the extent to which language is shaped by social and political realities. In doing this, we hope to show that the preferred and unmarked rhetorical patterns exemplified earlier are themselves shaped by these principles of sequencing. Here we consider the principles of rhetorical organisation primarily from a linguistic standpoint, and will argue that the principles that operate at the level of the sentence also operate at the higher levels of discourse and text. This is the unmarked rhetorical sequence. We have argued that people engaged in bottom-up rhetoric and persuasion in a hierarchical society naturally adopted a rhetorical arrangement that followed a “because-therefore” or “frame-main” sequence, although we also stress that this was by no means exclusively so. To date we have provided a review of historical aspects of Chinese rhetoric and persuasion, along with a number of examples and illustrations. Chapter 8 will discuss this in more detail, and provide the historical context which saw the rise of Western influence. During the discussion we touch on the role that Western influence played on the sequencing in Chinese. Chapter 7 continues the discussion and considers these principles of rhetorical organisation operating at the level of discourse. We start at the level of phrase and sentence, moving to the ordering of complex clauses. In this chapter we review and describe principles of rhetorical organisation in Chinese. Principles of Sequencing and Rhetorical Organisation: Words, Sentences and Complex Clauses
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |