Lexical Bundles in Chinese

The present dissertation aims to identify lexical bundles (i.e., recurrent word sequences) in Chinese conversation and news and investigate their use in discourse. A structural taxonomy is created for lexical bundles in Chinese, and their functions are also closely examined. In the present study, three-word and four-word lexical bundles are identified from the Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (the fourth edition). An initial list includes word sequences occurring at least twenty times per million words and in at least five corpus texts. To deal with vital methodological issues concerning this almost purely frequency-based approach, another more sensitive dispersion measure, a word association measure, and a manual analysis are needed. A data exploratory analysis of lexical bundles in Chinese shows that conversations feature a much wider range of lexical bundles than newswire texts; as for the proportion of corpus data covered by lexical bundles, conversation is also higher than news. The same tendency has been observed in English, suggesting that in spontaneous speech, speakers are under real-time pressure and thus rely more heavily on prefabricated chunks such as lexical bundles. A comprehensive investigation of lexical bundles in Chinese conversation provides more cross-linguistic support for previous findings in English. First, most lexical bundles in Chinese conversation are not structurally complete and run across traditional grammatical structures, but they can be systematically categorized according to their structural characteristics. Second, these bundles serve important functions in discourse, facilitating interpersonal communication (e.g., expressing stances), organizing discourse (e.g., introducing a topic), and having a variety of referential uses. Third, there is a strong relationship between the structure and the function of lexical bundles: stance bundles are closely associated with clausal and VP-based categories, whereas referential expressions are closely associated with NP-based categories. On the other hand, a striking difference between Chinese and English is that NP-based bundles are much more dominant in Chinese, and this is attributed to structural characteristics specific to Chinese. Furthermore, a detailed examination of lexical bundles in Chinese news suggests that conventions and principles in journalistic writing (e.g., sticking to facts, avoiding ambiguities, relating news event to readers, using shorter forms) influence the distribution of news bundles. For example, imprecision bundles and personal epistemic bundles that express an uncertain stance occur less frequently in news than in conversation, while some discourse organizers that are used to identify something newsworthy to the reader occur more frequently in news than in conversation. Despite these differences, news bundles fit comfortably in with the classification frameworks of conversation bundles, and the relationship between the structure and the function of lexical bundles is reconfirmed. It is hoped that the findings of the present dissertation on lexical bundles in Chinese can elucidate the emergent nature of multi-word units from a usage-based perspective and illustrate complex interactions between language-specific structural properties and genre-specific communicative needs. The lexical bundles identified in the present study can be used to enrich existing language resources in Chinese, and they may also serve as important references for language teachers/learners and psycholinguistic experiments.