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The Diachronic Evolution of Fanzheng into a Versatile Mandarin Discourse Marker

Author(s)

Kaiwen Wu*

Affiliation(s)

School of Humanities and Social Science, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China *Corresponding Author

Abstract

Based on the theory of grammatisation, this study systematically examines the diachronic evolution path and synchronic pragmatic functions of the Chinese discourse marker “Fanzheng” from verbs (“set things right”) to modal adverbs (“anyway”) and then to multifunctional discourse markers. Through quantitative analysis of the interaction patterns of 8,385 cases of the CCL corpus of Peking University (with adverbs/discourse markers accounting for 91.8%) and 24 pieces of natural spoken language, it was found that its pragmatic function is highly dependent on the position of the discourse wheel: The starting position of the talk wheel realizes topic switching and mitiges negative evaluations, the middle position avoids position conflicts and serves as a filling and delaying strategy, and the last position hands over the talk wheel and weakens the strength of assertions. This “location-function” correspondence mechanism reveals the deep interaction between the syntactic process and real-time interaction. It not only deepens the dynamic evolution theory of Chinese discourse markers but also provides a new perspective for the functional differentiation design of second language teaching and cross-language comparative studies.

Keywords

Fanzheng; Discourse Marker; Grammaticalization; Pragmatic Functions

References

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