Thinking about Xiang3 in Taiwan: Some Native-Speaker Opinions Robert Sanders & Satoshi Uehara University of Aukland & Tohoku University It has been observed in languages such as Japanese and Korean that ‘internal states’, e.g. mental processes, emotions, opinions, etc., can be easily expressed with a first-person sentential subject, but cannot be easily expressed with a third- person subject (Uehara 2000). In English, on the other hand, “He thinks it will rain very shortly” sounds just as natural as “I think it will rain very shortly”. We report here the results of a survey of 182 native speakers of Taiwan Mandarin (TM), 32 of whom were monolingual speakers and 150 of whom were also native speakers of Taiwan Southern Min (TSM) with regard to the use of both plain xiang3 and xiang3shuo1, which contains the complentizer shuo1 (Cheng 1985), to express the opinions of first and third person subjects in each variety of Chinese. The results show that both TM and TSM exhibit different degrees of acceptability between the two person subjects. We argue that the structural patterns of person restriction observed in TM and TSM can be accounted for in terms of cognitive and sociolinguistic factors. 1. Introduction Reported opinion can be expressed in Chinese using a variety of different verbs, including 想 xiang3 ‘to cogitate’, 覺得 jue2de ‘to feel’, 人為 ren4wei2 ‘believe it to be the case that’, 看 kan4 ‘to see’ and 說 shuo1 ‘to say’. Of these, xiang3 is the verb whose core meaning 1 best matches the meaning ‘to think’ that linguists (Wierzbicka 1974, Romaine and Lange 1991, Chafe 1994, etc.) consider to be the prototypical framing verb for reported thought. For this reason, this study examines xiang3, and focuses on its use in Taiwan Mandarin (henceforth TM) . Over the past few years several linguistic studies have been presented that focus on the role of thought reporting verbs, including xiang3, in expressing opinions (Sanders 1 Disagreement does exist even among prescriptive authorities as to the degree to which xiang3 can in fact express the strong opinion of a sentential subject. On the one hand, Xiandai Hanyu Cidian (1999) explicitly lists the subjectively strong verb 人为 ren4wei2 ‘believe it to be the case that’ as one of its basic meanings, while on the other hand Lü (1981) is more circumspect, offering only the more tentative 料想 liao4xiang3 ‘expect’ and 估计 gu1ji4 ‘reckon’ as semantic equivalents. Given its relatively wider authoritative currency, we follow Xiandai Hanyu Cidian here.