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Article published In:
Chinese Language and Discourse
Vol. 8:2 (2017) ► pp.174–211

A corpus-based study of the recurrent lexical bundle ka li kong ‘let (me) tell you’ in Taiwanese Southern Min conversations

| National Taiwan Normal University
| National Taiwan University

This paper investigates the most frequent lexical bundle (LB) ka li kong (to-you-say) (KLK), in an 18.5-hour Taiwanese Southern Min conversation corpus. The analysis focuses on the discourse-pragmatic functions of KLK, the role it plays in the speaker’s management of information in talk-in-interaction, and the collocations that are employed. The results show that the speaker utilizes KLK to imply epistemic authority regarding the veracity of the predication. Meanwhile, it expresses the speaker’s stance or functions as a discourse organizer to initiate a narrative that is newsworthy. Prosodically, it is always processed as a holistic chunk with great phonological reduction. Along with the low transitivity of the verb kong demonstrated by the type of object it takes, we argue that KLK is developing into a discourse marker. Collocation of KLK with the marker toh further triggers the grammaticalization of the four-word bundle toh ka li kong (TKLK) to encode an extreme stance.

Keywords: recurrent lexical bundle, Taiwanese Southern Min, conversation, corpus, stance marking, discourse organizer
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous studies
    • 2.1LBs in discourse
    • 2.2 Let me tell you and related expressions in English and Mandarin
  • 3.Data and terminology
  • 4.Functions of KLK in conversation
    • 4.1Typical telling function
    • 4.2Stance marking and grammaticalization of the discourse marker toh KLK
      • 4.2.1Presenting a negative appraisal
      • 4.2.2Repetition of an obvious fact
      • 4.2.3Grammaticalization of the emphatic discourse marker toh KLK
      • 4.2.4Prefacing a speech act
    • 4.3Discourse organizer: Facilitation of storytelling
    • 4.4Summary
    • 4.5Fixedness and automaticity: Emergence of KLK as a discourse marker
  • 5.Discussion and Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 26 January 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cld.17004.cha
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