Thinking about Xiang3 in Taiwan: Some Native-Speaker Opinions

Abstract

It has been observed in languages such as Japanese and Korean that ‘internal states’, e.g. mental processes, emotions, opinions, etc., can be easily expressed with a first-person sentential subject, but cannot be easily expressed with a thirdperson subject (Uehara 2000). In English, on the other hand, “He thinks it will rain very shortly” sounds just as natural as “I think it will rain very shortly”. We report here the results of a survey of 182 native speakers of Taiwan Mandarin (TM), 32 of whom were monolingual speakers and 150 of whom were also native speakers of Taiwan Southern Min (TSM) with regard to the use of both plain xiang3 and xiang3shuo1, which contains the complentizer shuo1 (Cheng 1985), to express the opinions of first and third person subjects in each variety of Chinese. The results show that both TM and TSM exhibit different degrees of acceptability between the two person subjects. We argue that the structural patterns of person restriction observed in TM and TSM can be accounted for in terms of cognitive and sociolinguistic factors.