Surface cues and pragmatic interpretation of given/new in Mandarin Chinese and English: A comparative study

Formal surface devices at syntactic, prosodic, and semantic levels may converge, compete, or conspire with each other for specific meanings/functions assignment, such as given and new interpretation. Studies based on the Competition Model have shown that form–function mappings are assigned different strengths determined by the statistical distributions of certain attributes of the cues, depending on language structure. In view of the qualitative and quantitative differences between Mandarin Chinese and English, this comparative study, by adopting a verification task, investigates the similarities and differences in the utilization of the surface cues of word order, marked cleft structure, animacy, and focal accent between the two languages for given and new interpretation within an isolated sentence. Forty Taiwanese Mandarin and American English adult speakers, each with 20, were asked to verify a stimulus sentence against a pair of pictures to measure their interpretation of the given and new distinctions implied in a particular stimulus. The results showed that the hierarchy of cue strength in Mandarin Chinese, in descending order, was word order, animacy, focal accent, and cleft, while that in English was cleft, word order, focal accent, and animacy. The findings support the interactive constraint-based view of pragmatic processing, and reveal cross-linguistic variations, which were explored from typological, psycholinguistic, and information patterning perspectives.

► We compare the utilization of surface cues for given and new interpretation between Mandarin Chinese and English.
► The surface cues examined are word order, marked cleft structure, focal accent, and animacy in various configurations.
► Cross-linguistic variations exist in the hierarchy of cue strength across the two languages.
► The findings help contribute to an enhanced understanding of intercultural studies and information theory.