ABSTRACT
Verbal experiences are heavily contextualized. Speech sounds are embedded in words, words in sentences and sentences in text and utterances. Discourse, which is made of interrelated clauses, conveys messages that motivate and unify grammatically defined units such as phrases and sentences. The goal of discourse processing research has been to unravel how interpretations of linguistic expressions beyond words and sentences are achieved and how they serve communicative functions in textual and social contexts. This chapter provides an overview of Chinese discourse processing, highlighting two important abilities of human language comprehension: the ability to integrate linguistic materials and the ability to make predictions. Linguistic composition involves accessing the grammatical and semantic properties of lower-level linguistic units to form larger units. Representations that have been constructed and temporarily stored in the working memory need to be integrated with materials that show up at a later point of the discourse. Discourse prediction, on the other hand, involves incrementally using information from earlier linguistic units and higher linguistic levels to predict how an utterance may unfold. With these two abilities, propositions are composed, the logical connections between propositions are established, and mental models about discourse content can be constructed.
