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Gender-Related Use of Tonal Patterns in Mandarin Chinese

The Case of Sentence-Final Particle Ma

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Chinese Lexical Semantics (CLSW 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 13496))

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Abstract

Gender and language and gendered language are two important topics where linguistic studies have great societal impacts. These two topic have not been well studied in Mandarin Chinese due to its lack of grammatical gender marking. We explore the gendered usage of Mandarin Chinese sentence-final particle (SFP) in casual conversation to address this issue. Previous studies of SPFs focus either on grammatical function or on pragmatic uses of expressing attitude or emotion. This study focuses on the gender-related use of tonal patterns in association with SFP ma in Mandarin Chinese. By combining the stance marking of Mandarin Chinese SFPs [13] as well as the attitudinal marking function of prosody to study gendered language patterned in Chinese, the results show that the gender selection of tonal patterns of ma in different sentence types seem to vary. We believe that this study will significantly enhance the research on language and gender.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China

    Xin Luo & Chu-Ren Huang

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  1. Xin Luo
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  2. Chu-Ren Huang
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Correspondence to Xin Luo .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Peking University, Beijing, China

    Qi Su

  2. Minjiang University, Fuzhou, China

    Ge Xu

  3. Minjiang University, Fuzhou, China

    Xiaoyan Yang

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Luo, X., Huang, CR. (2023). Gender-Related Use of Tonal Patterns in Mandarin Chinese. In: Su, Q., Xu, G., Yang, X. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13496. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28956-9_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28956-9_8

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-28955-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-28956-9

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