“Teaching Materials and Authentic Language: a case study of shi…de sentences from corpora”

ABSTRACT
With the growing interest in corpora (i.e., large databases of authentic language stored in a machine-readable form), the issue of “authenticity” is raided to critique traditional foreign language teaching materials, which are mostly developed based on the material writers’ intuition. The argument could be made for less commonly taught foreign languages too. This project compares the language represented in Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) textbooks with authentic data in native language corpora.  The sentence structure under investigation is the Chinese shi…de sentence.

Both shi and de are important vocabulary items in Chinese. shi is typically considered a copular (roughly similar to is/are/to be, etc. in English), while de is analyzed as a noun phrase clitic or nominalizer. Both words are among the most frequently used vocabulary items in Chinese and bear a variety of functions. Current CFL textbooks introduce shi…de sentences as emphatic sentences with a focus on manner, location, purpose, etc. Different linguistic analyses for shi…de sentences also exist. But no one has yet examined the structure from authentic language data. This project examines 202 examples from the Sinica corpus and the Center of Chinese Linguistics Corpus, and finds that shi…de sentences can take a variety of predicates. Contrary to most CFL textbooks and some linguistic proposals suggest, the [+focus] function is not the prototypical function. The emphatic usage is only compatible with the subject+shi (+adjunct) + verb phrase(VP) [-dynamic]+de structure, and it constitutes only a small fraction of shi…de sentences (15 out of 202).

Most shi…de sentences (162 out of 202) take a VP [-dynamic] in between, which means that the structure often occurs with stative adjectives. Native speakers utilize the structure to indicate their categorization of certain entity/phenomena. Such a “categorization” function is often accompanied by the speakers’ taking a stance on an issue. Such linguistic and pragmatic functions of shi…de are unduly ignored in current CFL materials and this study prompts us to give more attention to shi+adj.+de sentences in teaching.

A unanimous linguistic analysis of the structure is also given, such that an empty category within shi…de needs to be co-indexed with and interpreted by the external argument of shi.

While teaching materials do not need to delve into detailed linguistic analysis, language teachers and material writers do need to have a firm grasp of how a particular structure (or form) is associated with its functions (or meanings). The rather unsurprising findings of this study warn materials writers to rely on authentic language data to develop textbooks and reference tools. CFL has not yet developed its own effective methodology, and the historical change of the language makes the material design even more challenging. But corpus analysis should be one way to make the textbook/classroom language more authentic and the teaching more effective.

Selected References
Qi, H. & Zhang, Q. (2005). A review of researches on shi...de sentences. Journal of Radio & TV University (Philosophy & Social Sciences), 4, 37-40.
Ross, C. (1998). On the functions of Mandarin de. Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 11(2), 214-246.
Shi, D. (1994). The nature of Chinese emphatic sentences. Journal of East Asian Linguistics, 3(1). 81-100.
Shi, D. (2003). Theoretical grammar and Chinese language teaching. Chinese Teaching in the World. 2, 5-12.
Yang, C. (2004). An analysis of the shi…de sentence pattern in TCFL. Journal of Yunnan Norma University. 2(5), 73-76.