H Tao
Biographic Data
| ID | 29370 |
|---|---|
| NAME | H Tao |
| GIVEN NAMES | H |
| FAMILY NAME | Tao |
| SIGNATURE | TAO H |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Los Angeles |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2573-492X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 133 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Navigating interactional troubles in conversation: The use of lí kóng ‘you say’ in Taiwanese Southern Min
This paper explores the deployment of lí kóng ‘you say’ (LK) as a formulaic reported speech (RS) initiator in Taiwanese Southern Min natural conversation for navigating interactional troubles. An interactional trouble here refers to either (1) a problematic point arising from linguistic errors, misunderstandings, or misaligned assumptions between interlocutors, or (2) an arguable topic related to the ongoing conversational topic. Three major patt…
More than a summarizing conjunction: Some emerging conversation interactional uses of Zongzhi ‘in sum’ in Mandarin Chinese
As a linking element, zongzhi ‘in sum, to sum up’ displays archaic qualities and is most commonly associated with formal written Chinese discourse. However, this paper demonstrates that zongzhi can also be deployed in dialogic interactions in contemporary spoken Chinese to accomplish distinct social actions. Drawing on a variety of dialogic data, we identify a major distinction between tokens produced by the primary speaker and those produced by …
Interrogatives and speaker stance: From information-seeking to interpersonal (dis)affiliation
The pragmatics of creative language use in East Asian languages
Creativity as theoryCreative language use has been one of the foundational issues for much of modern linguistics.For example, Chomsky's (1957Chomsky's ( , 1965) ) generative programme rests crucially on the notion of the creative aspect of language use (along with the notion of the alleged poverty of stimulus, McGilvray, 2001) as he defines them.Thus, Chomsky (1965, p. 6) articulates the theoretical interest of generative grammar in terms of an u…
Multimodal amusement resonance as a conversation interactional device
The incorporation of materials from the previous speaker in subsequent speaker talk has been variably characterised as repetition (Tannen, 1987), format tying (M. Goodwin, 1990), resonance (Du Bois, 2014) and so forth (henceforth “resonance”). Resonance has been shown to be a pervasive feature of everyday talk-in-interaction. This paper, with data from Mandarin Chinese and American English, shows first that resonance can manifest in multiple moda…
Acquisition of the Epistemic Discourse Marker Wo Juede by Native Taiwan Mandarin Speakers
This study examines the use of a fixed expression, wo juede (WJ) 'I feel, I think', in Taiwan Mandarin in the context of two types of oral production tasks: argumentative and negotiative discourses. The participants consisted of two groups used for comparison: one group of children from Grades 2, 4, and 6, and one group of adults (college students). The results show that both groups were more inclined to utilize WJ in argumentative genres than in…
Fanzheng 'anyway' as a discourse pragmatic particle in Mandarin conversation: Prosody, locus, and interactional function
Referring expressions in categorizing activities: Rethinking the nature of linguistic units for the study of interaction
Linguistic units as traditionally conceived by linguists favor structural features and referential meanings. In this paper, we propose a new way of understanding the nature of linguistic units by analyzing the interaction of multiple semiotic resources (gestures, bodily movement, eye gaze and speech) in social interaction. We focus on the discursive activity of “categorizing” in different situations and in two languages, English and Mandarin Chin…
Expressing (inter)subjectivity with universal quantification: A pragmatic account of Plural NP + dou expressions in Mandarin Chinese
A crosslinguistic study of some extended uses of what -based interrogative expressions in Chinese, English, and Korean
Interrogative pronouns such as what in English, shenme in Mandarin Chinese, and mwe/mwusun in Korean all have developed extended uses beyond interrogation. Such uses may include filling a gap in conversation, softening a speaker’s epistemic stance, and indicating strong emotions such as surprises or incredulity. Yet there is little research dealing with crosslinguistic patterns with large corpora of interactive discourse data. In this paper, we i…
Disputed memory and the social interactive functions of remembering/forgetting expressions in Mandarin conversation
The rise of a high transitivity marker 到 dao in contemporary Chinese: Co-evolvement of language and society
Transitivity has been approached from various discourse functional points of view. In this paper, we describe the emergence in standard Chinese of a marker of high transitivity, 到 dao ‘reach’, in syntactic contexts where it has not been attested before (e.g., 帮助到你 bangzhu dao ni ‘help you’). We argue that this emergence is associated with a number of factors: the semantic properties of the main verb, dialectal influences, and recent social trends…
Conversation, grammar, and fixedness: Adjectives in Mandarin revisited
The categoriality of ‘adjectives’ has been a favorite topic of discussion in functional Chinese linguistics. However, the literature leaves us with no clear picture of the ‘adjective’ category for Mandarin. In this paper, we take a usage-based approach to revisit the issue of adjectives in Mandarin. Our investigation of a corpus of face-to-face conversations shows that conversational Mandarin favors Predicate Adjectives over Attributive Adjective…
A unified account of causal clause sequences in Mandarin Chinese and its implications
Causal clauses introduced by yīnwèi in Chinese can have either an initial position or a final position with regard to the main clause. While traditional grammars have treated the initial sequence as the default form, numerous discourse-based studies have shown just the opposite. However, few have attempted to explain why both sequence orders exist and why they have skewed distribution patterns across discourse registers. In this paper we use a te…
A corpus-based sociolinguistic study of amplifiers in British English
Amplifiers such as ‘very’, ‘so’, ‘absolutely’ and ‘totally’ are a common type of intensifiers in the English language. While earlier studies have explored the meaning and grammar of amplifiers, as well as their connection with sociolinguistic variables, notably genre categories, few have explored extralinguistic parameters on the basis of substantive corpus data. In this article we use the British National Corpus (BNC), the largest balanced corpu…
Richard Xiao & Tony McEnery 2004, Aspect In Mandarin Chinese: A Corpus-based Study
Preview this article: Richard Xiao & Tony McEnery 2004, Aspect In Mandarin Chinese: A Corpus-based Study, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/sl.30.3.09tao-1.gif
Guest Editor's Foreword
Response to Newmeyer's 'Grammar is Grammar and Usage is Usage
In an article in a recent issue of Language (Newmeyer 2003), Frederick Newmeyer argues for a clear separation between what he terms ‘knowledge of language [i.e. grammar] and use of language [i.e. pragmatics]’ (682). In developing his argument, N makes frequent reference to linguistic analyses that are corpus-based, that is, centered on information taken from large datasets of actual speech or writing (e.g. transcriptions of conversations, newspap…
A usage-based approach to argument structure: ‘Remember’ and ‘Forget’ in spoken English
The English verbs remember and forget are typically treated by syntacticians as mental process verbs whose argument structure is characterized by a variety of possible complements. Based on extensive corpus data, Tao (2001) investigates the use of remember in spoken English and proposes that complement-taking is actually a marginal feature of remember, and remember can be seen as undergoing changes toward becoming a discourse particle in spoken E…
Understanding non-restrictive which-clauses in spoken English, which is not an easy thing
Age Vitality Across Eleven Nations
This paper is the second in a series of empirical applications of the concept of (ethnolinguistic) vitality into the intergenerational arena. It examines young people's assessments of the subjective vitalities of young, middle-aged, and elderly targets in four Western (midwest USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) and seven south and east Asian sites (Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, mainland China, The Philippines, and India). The resul…
The conversational use of reactive tokens in English, Japanese, and Mandarin
NP Intonation Units and Referent Identification
Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on The Place of Morphology in a Grammar (1992), pp. 237-247
English backchannels in Mandarin conversations: A case study of superstratum pragmatic 'interference
The conversational use of reactive tokens in English, Japanese, and Mandarin
Age Vitality Across Eleven Nations
This paper is the second in a series of empirical applications of the concept of (ethnolinguistic) vitality into the intergenerational arena. It examines young people's assessments of the subjective vitalities of young, middle-aged, and elderly targets in four Western (midwest USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) and seven south and east Asian sites (Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, mainland China, The Philippines, and India). The resul…
English backchannels in Mandarin conversations: A case study of superstratum pragmatic 'interference
Interrogatives and speaker stance: From information-seeking to interpersonal (dis)affiliation
Fanzheng 'anyway' as a discourse pragmatic particle in Mandarin conversation: Prosody, locus, and interactional function
A corpus-based sociolinguistic study of amplifiers in British English
Amplifiers such as ‘very’, ‘so’, ‘absolutely’ and ‘totally’ are a common type of intensifiers in the English language. While earlier studies have explored the meaning and grammar of amplifiers, as well as their connection with sociolinguistic variables, notably genre categories, few have explored extralinguistic parameters on the basis of substantive corpus data. In this article we use the British National Corpus (BNC), the largest balanced corpu…
Understanding non-restrictive which-clauses in spoken English, which is not an easy thing
A usage-based approach to argument structure: ‘Remember’ and ‘Forget’ in spoken English
The English verbs remember and forget are typically treated by syntacticians as mental process verbs whose argument structure is characterized by a variety of possible complements. Based on extensive corpus data, Tao (2001) investigates the use of remember in spoken English and proposes that complement-taking is actually a marginal feature of remember, and remember can be seen as undergoing changes toward becoming a discourse particle in spoken E…
Expressing (inter)subjectivity with universal quantification: A pragmatic account of Plural NP + dou expressions in Mandarin Chinese
Disputed memory and the social interactive functions of remembering/forgetting expressions in Mandarin conversation
English backchannels in Mandarin conversations: A case study of superstratum pragmatic 'interference
NP Intonation Units and Referent Identification
Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on The Place of Morphology in a Grammar (1992), pp. 237-247
The conversational use of reactive tokens in English, Japanese, and Mandarin
Age Vitality Across Eleven Nations
This paper is the second in a series of empirical applications of the concept of (ethnolinguistic) vitality into the intergenerational arena. It examines young people's assessments of the subjective vitalities of young, middle-aged, and elderly targets in four Western (midwest USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) and seven south and east Asian sites (Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, mainland China, The Philippines, and India). The resul…
Understanding non-restrictive which-clauses in spoken English, which is not an easy thing
A usage-based approach to argument structure: ‘Remember’ and ‘Forget’ in spoken English
The English verbs remember and forget are typically treated by syntacticians as mental process verbs whose argument structure is characterized by a variety of possible complements. Based on extensive corpus data, Tao (2001) investigates the use of remember in spoken English and proposes that complement-taking is actually a marginal feature of remember, and remember can be seen as undergoing changes toward becoming a discourse particle in spoken E…
Response to Newmeyer's 'Grammar is Grammar and Usage is Usage
In an article in a recent issue of Language (Newmeyer 2003), Frederick Newmeyer argues for a clear separation between what he terms ‘knowledge of language [i.e. grammar] and use of language [i.e. pragmatics]’ (682). In developing his argument, N makes frequent reference to linguistic analyses that are corpus-based, that is, centered on information taken from large datasets of actual speech or writing (e.g. transcriptions of conversations, newspap…
Richard Xiao & Tony McEnery 2004, Aspect In Mandarin Chinese: A Corpus-based Study
Preview this article: Richard Xiao & Tony McEnery 2004, Aspect In Mandarin Chinese: A Corpus-based Study, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/sl.30.3.09tao-1.gif
Guest Editor's Foreword
A corpus-based sociolinguistic study of amplifiers in British English
Amplifiers such as ‘very’, ‘so’, ‘absolutely’ and ‘totally’ are a common type of intensifiers in the English language. While earlier studies have explored the meaning and grammar of amplifiers, as well as their connection with sociolinguistic variables, notably genre categories, few have explored extralinguistic parameters on the basis of substantive corpus data. In this article we use the British National Corpus (BNC), the largest balanced corpu…
A unified account of causal clause sequences in Mandarin Chinese and its implications
Causal clauses introduced by yīnwèi in Chinese can have either an initial position or a final position with regard to the main clause. While traditional grammars have treated the initial sequence as the default form, numerous discourse-based studies have shown just the opposite. However, few have attempted to explain why both sequence orders exist and why they have skewed distribution patterns across discourse registers. In this paper we use a te…
Conversation, grammar, and fixedness: Adjectives in Mandarin revisited
The categoriality of ‘adjectives’ has been a favorite topic of discussion in functional Chinese linguistics. However, the literature leaves us with no clear picture of the ‘adjective’ category for Mandarin. In this paper, we take a usage-based approach to revisit the issue of adjectives in Mandarin. Our investigation of a corpus of face-to-face conversations shows that conversational Mandarin favors Predicate Adjectives over Attributive Adjective…
The rise of a high transitivity marker 到 dao in contemporary Chinese: Co-evolvement of language and society
Transitivity has been approached from various discourse functional points of view. In this paper, we describe the emergence in standard Chinese of a marker of high transitivity, 到 dao ‘reach’, in syntactic contexts where it has not been attested before (e.g., 帮助到你 bangzhu dao ni ‘help you’). We argue that this emergence is associated with a number of factors: the semantic properties of the main verb, dialectal influences, and recent social trends…
Disputed memory and the social interactive functions of remembering/forgetting expressions in Mandarin conversation
A crosslinguistic study of some extended uses of what -based interrogative expressions in Chinese, English, and Korean
Interrogative pronouns such as what in English, shenme in Mandarin Chinese, and mwe/mwusun in Korean all have developed extended uses beyond interrogation. Such uses may include filling a gap in conversation, softening a speaker’s epistemic stance, and indicating strong emotions such as surprises or incredulity. Yet there is little research dealing with crosslinguistic patterns with large corpora of interactive discourse data. In this paper, we i…
Expressing (inter)subjectivity with universal quantification: A pragmatic account of Plural NP + dou expressions in Mandarin Chinese
Referring expressions in categorizing activities: Rethinking the nature of linguistic units for the study of interaction
Linguistic units as traditionally conceived by linguists favor structural features and referential meanings. In this paper, we propose a new way of understanding the nature of linguistic units by analyzing the interaction of multiple semiotic resources (gestures, bodily movement, eye gaze and speech) in social interaction. We focus on the discursive activity of “categorizing” in different situations and in two languages, English and Mandarin Chin…
Fanzheng 'anyway' as a discourse pragmatic particle in Mandarin conversation: Prosody, locus, and interactional function
The pragmatics of creative language use in East Asian languages
Creativity as theoryCreative language use has been one of the foundational issues for much of modern linguistics.For example, Chomsky's (1957Chomsky's ( , 1965) ) generative programme rests crucially on the notion of the creative aspect of language use (along with the notion of the alleged poverty of stimulus, McGilvray, 2001) as he defines them.Thus, Chomsky (1965, p. 6) articulates the theoretical interest of generative grammar in terms of an u…
Multimodal amusement resonance as a conversation interactional device
The incorporation of materials from the previous speaker in subsequent speaker talk has been variably characterised as repetition (Tannen, 1987), format tying (M. Goodwin, 1990), resonance (Du Bois, 2014) and so forth (henceforth “resonance”). Resonance has been shown to be a pervasive feature of everyday talk-in-interaction. This paper, with data from Mandarin Chinese and American English, shows first that resonance can manifest in multiple moda…
Acquisition of the Epistemic Discourse Marker Wo Juede by Native Taiwan Mandarin Speakers
This study examines the use of a fixed expression, wo juede (WJ) 'I feel, I think', in Taiwan Mandarin in the context of two types of oral production tasks: argumentative and negotiative discourses. The participants consisted of two groups used for comparison: one group of children from Grades 2, 4, and 6, and one group of adults (college students). The results show that both groups were more inclined to utilize WJ in argumentative genres than in…
Interrogatives and speaker stance: From information-seeking to interpersonal (dis)affiliation
Navigating interactional troubles in conversation: The use of lí kóng ‘you say’ in Taiwanese Southern Min
This paper explores the deployment of lí kóng ‘you say’ (LK) as a formulaic reported speech (RS) initiator in Taiwanese Southern Min natural conversation for navigating interactional troubles. An interactional trouble here refers to either (1) a problematic point arising from linguistic errors, misunderstandings, or misaligned assumptions between interlocutors, or (2) an arguable topic related to the ongoing conversational topic. Three major patt…
More than a summarizing conjunction: Some emerging conversation interactional uses of Zongzhi ‘in sum’ in Mandarin Chinese
As a linking element, zongzhi ‘in sum, to sum up’ displays archaic qualities and is most commonly associated with formal written Chinese discourse. However, this paper demonstrates that zongzhi can also be deployed in dialogic interactions in contemporary spoken Chinese to accomplish distinct social actions. Drawing on a variety of dialogic data, we identify a major distinction between tokens produced by the primary speaker and those produced by …
Linguistics (21 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (19 works) · Psychology (17 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (12 works) · Mandarin Chinese (11 works) · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies (10 works) · Conversation (7 works) · Pragmatics (6 works)