A Conversational Study of the Particle ne in Mandarin Chinese
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Abstract
In Mandarin Chinese, the particle ne has been studied using written text, constructed examples, and hypothetical discourse settings. However, these studies overlooked the interaction and relationships that exist between speakers when considering the usage of ne. In this thesis, we analyze the occurrences of the particle ne in spontaneous conversational data and individually examine the structural and functional properties of the particle ne. The phonetic features of ne and its placements, which are based on the phonetic features, are introduced as the structural properties. For our analysis, the functional properties are dichotomized into two subcategories: non-interrogative and interrogative usage. Our analysis uses notions of topicality, information activation, and formulaic language to explain the usage pattern of the particle ne, while providing qualitative information on its distribution for each functional subcategory.