Сравнение китайских и английских речевых связок в устных повествованиях

Labov and Waletzky defined narrative as “one verbal technique for recapitulating past experience, in particular a technique of constructing narrative units which match the temporal sequence of that experience” (1967: 13). According to Fina and Georgakopoulou (2012:4), for narratologists, a story (narrative) has to comprise a series of related events, and chronological ordering is the main criterion to distinguish stories from other texts. While in his Dictionary of Narratology, Prince proposed instead that such a link was not only chronological, but also causal. Most of the classical narratologists (Prince 1973; Genette 1980; Bal 1985; Chatman 1990; Prince 2003) held a similar viewpoint and defined narrative as a series of temporally and causally ordered events.

In a narrative a series of related events are represented by a series of related clauses. The connection between clauses can be realized implicitly or explicitly, i.e. without linkages or with linkages. In a narrative task, the narrator has to connect or organize events in a logic sequence by introducing and maintaining reference to the entities and persons involved in the events in a way that is coherent for the interlocutor (Carroll and Natale 2010), and by using proper linkages or “structural means” (Natale 2013) in a coherent text.

Linkages in narratives have been studied by researchers in language acquisition, discourse analysis and syntax. Natale (2013) compared the use of linkage in narratives between monoligual speakers of French and Italian, as well as early and late French-Italian bilinguals, and investigated in how far Italian-French bilinguals acquire the patterns of monolingual speakers of Italian. Arssen et al. (2001) studied the development of linkage in narratives by comparing Turkish in four different settings, in Australia, France, the Netherlands and Turkey, to shed light on the question whether language contact influences the process of first language acquisition. Li (2009) compared the use of linkages in story-telling by Chinese native speakers and learners of Chinese as a foreign language from the perspective of discourse markers analysis to reveal the implication of the integration of the functions and meanings of discourse markers into L2 instruction. Nir and Berman (2010) studied the complex syntax in the sense of text-embedded clause-combining with 64 narrative texts written by graduate-level university students, native speakers of four different languages (English, French, Hebrew, and Spanish), examined the nature of syntactic architecture in monologic narratives, and compared how speaker-writer of different languages deploy syntactic packaging in the context of extended discourse. Scholars studied the function of 然后 ránhòu (then; and then) as a discourse marker and linkage in oral Mandarin Chinese. Wang and Zhou (2005) presented the traditional use of 然后 ránhòu (then; and then) in ancient Chinese and then studied its functional extension in modern Chinese by making a questionnaire investigation and corpus analysis. Xu (2009) identified three discourse function of 然后 ránhòu (then; and then) according to its prosodic features and position in the flow of discourse based on 8.22 hours of naturally occurring spoken Chinese data. Ma (2010) took 然后 ránhòu (then; and then) and 但是 dànshì (but) as examples to study the relations between discourse markers and pet phrases, showing that pet phrases are the realization of discourse markers, the further grammaticalization of the discourse markers driven by rhetoric intention.

The above mentioned studies on linkages are made from different angles, and they either made a comparison between languages from the perspective of language development, language learning or language contact, or they focus on some specific linkages in a certain language. However, a comparison between linkages in different languages should be based on a comprehensive linguistic analysis, and in turn a comprehensive linguistic analysis of linkages should be based on the study of specific language items. Furthermore, narrative possesses certain universal properties at the same time as presenting cultural specificity (Fina 2012).

In the present study we will examine the use of linkages in oral narratives by English and Chinese native speakers comprehensively and prove the universal properties and cultural specificity of narrative based on 20 Chinese and 20 English texts of Pear Stories, transcripts of narratives of 20 Chinese speakers and 20 English speakers after watching a short simple film made by a team led by Professor Wallace Chafe, a specialist in Native American languages.