Paper Presented at the 17th North American Conference on
Chinese Linguistics (NACCL-17), Monterey, California. May 24-26, 2005,
A Discourse Construction Approach to LE and Its Language
Pedagogical Implications
Hongyin Tao
The morpheme LE is arguably one of the most difficult grammar
points in Chinese language teaching. In addition to the elusive nature
of the grammar of LE, most pedagogical approaches rely heavily on
isolated sentences as the basic unit to present LE. As a result, most
grammar teaching of LE has a less than satisfactory effect as evidenced
in the fact that the student may be able to produce a grammatically
well-formed sentence containing LE, yet the sentence is odd for the
intended communication purpose. While acknowledging
the advancement made in such works as Chu (1998) and Cui (2003)
where a discourse approach is adopted with great insights, in this paper
I advocate a discourse construction approach to LE and show why such
an approach is useful not only for our understanding of LE phenomena
but also for the teaching of LE in the second/foreign language context.
The so-called discourse construction approach is empirical and
makes extensive use of collections (corpora) of language samples from
actual discourse. It furthermore recognizes the role of co-occurring linguistic
elements and the larger constructional meanings over the meanings of the
constituting components. In this study I analyze data culled from both
naturalistic and edited spoken language corpora. My analysis shows that there
are a number of prominent patterns that have seldom been described in
Chinese grammars and textbooks. Some sample patterns include: “V-LE +
Conjunction JIU”; “S, Conjunction + V/Adj-LE”; “Speech V+LE, S+
SHUO”; “KUAI/YAO + V-LE”; and “TAI + V-LE”. These patterns, though
not typical traditional grammatical units, are highly frequent in discourse.
Moreover, these patterns have distinctive semantic connotations as well as
unique discourse textual functions. For example, the “Speech V+LE, S+
SHUO”; construction is often used to express an explanation or reason by
way of reported speech. After a discussion of the forms and functions of the
LE constructions that are recurrent in discourse, I will suggest that a more
effective pedagogy to LE should start with these constructions rather than
with some perceived sentence patterns involving LE. Such a change in priority
in grammar teaching, I contend, requires a change in our conceptualization of
the nature of grammar, and this change is necessary if we are to make
substantial progresses in Chinese language pedagogy.
