The Popular Chinese Soap Opera Struggle

The 2007 Beijing-based Chinese soap opera "Struggle" is a great language corpus for modern vernacular Mandarin. Using contextualised quotes, this book shows the reader how the directions implied by the verbs lái 'come' and qù 'go' are sometimes different from what is stipulated in the textbooks; how some pronunciations deviate from P ny n; how and when a role-pronoun is used; as well as a representative selection of words and usages current in this soap opera but which are not listed in the authoritative dictionary of modern Mandarin, the Xiàndài Hàny Cídi n. In addition to the linguistic aspects, the history of Chinese soap opera, ideological constrains, and the overall plot of "Struggle" are also included to place the kind of Mandarin Chinese this book deals with in a concrete historical and social context. The pragmatic contexts matter because the kinds of linguistic observations this book makes are all pragmatically context-bound. This book presents in an orderly manner certain features of informal speaking practices that should be of great interest to any learner of modern Chinese.

Autorentext

BA in Culture and Society Studies, and MA in East Asian Linguistics both at University of Oslo. Studied Mandarin Chinese at Peking University and National Taiwan University.

Klappentext

The 2007 Beijing-based Chinese soap opera "Struggle" is a great language corpus for modern vernacular Mandarin. Using contextualised quotes, this book shows the reader how the directions implied by the verbs lái 'come' and qù 'go' are sometimes different from what is stipulated in the textbooks; how some pronunciations deviate from Pinyin; how and when a role-pronoun is used; as well as a representative selection of words and usages current in this soap opera but which are not listed in the authoritative dictionary of modern Mandarin, the Xiàndài Hànyu Cídian. In addition to the linguistic aspects, the history of Chinese soap opera, ideological constrains, and the overall plot of "Struggle" are also included to place the kind of Mandarin Chinese this book deals with in a concrete historical and social context. The pragmatic contexts matter because the kinds of linguistic observations this book makes are all pragmatically context-bound. This book presents in an orderly manner certain features of informal speaking practices that should be of great interest to any learner of modern Chinese.