Download or read book Units in Mandarin Conversation written by Hongyin Tao and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1996-01-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hongyin Tao provides a new way of studying grammar based on the prosodic or intonation unit in spontaneous speech, rather than focusing on the unit of the artificially constructed sentence. Some notions developed from sentence-level data often do not account well for speech data. Contrary to the notion that the basic syntactic structure of a sentence comprises of both an NP and a VP, the author shows that a Mandarin sentence in spoken discourse can consist of a lone NP or a transitive verbal expression without any explicit argument (not anaphora). The author proposes the speech unit as one with which the grammar of Mandarin can better be understood. The book is of interest to scholars of discourse analysis, syntax, prosody, typology as well as of the Mandarin language.