Blog CRC1646

The summer school was organised by the European Association of Chinese Linguistics and took place from 16th to 20th June at the Palacky University Olomouc (Czech Republic). It offered a well-balanced mix of lectures, and hands-on workshops. The program covered key areas of Chinese linguistics, including prosody, sentence-final particles, argument structure, quantification, and scope. The focus on formal approaches to Chinese syntax and morphology provided the necessary theoretical tools to support this component of Julia Demina’s research.

In her part to project B03, she investigate how implicitness operates in discourse through indirect speech acts, with a particular focus on indirect requests across three languages: Russian, Turkish, and Chinese. The central objective of her project is to identify the morphosyntactic parameters that encode indirectness in requests. Analyzing Chinese data within this framework requires a solid understanding of language-specific syntactic structures, which often diverge considerably from those of Indo-European languages.

In the summer school Julia presented the design and preliminary results of an experimental study on indirect request strategies in Mandarin Chinese, part of the cross-linguistic work in project B03. In her talk she focused on how different morphosyntactic structures (e.g., question markers, sentence final particles) contribute to the interpretation of indirectness in requests. She also discussed the annotation framework that the B03 team is developing to capture morphological, syntactic, and pragmatic features in participant responses. This contribution sparked valuable discussion about the typological limits of certain analytical categories and the role of discourse context in interpreting indirectness. Several new contacts were established with scholars working on Mandarin and Southern Sinitic varieties, opening opportunities for collaboration.

© Dr. Tereza Slamenkova

Julia Demina © Sascha Hermannski

Project B03 © Sascha Hermannski