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Part of
New Explorations in Chinese Theoretical Syntax: Studies in honor of Yen-Hui Audrey Li
Edited by Andrew Simpson
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 272] 2022
► pp. 509–536

Sentence-internal discourse particles in Mandarin Chinese

| Peking University
This article investigates a group of sentence-internal discourse particles in Mandarin Chinese. We start with the general properties and proposes an approximation of the effects of three particles: yòu, dào, and yě. We then turn to their word order in the main clause and restricted distribution in embedded clauses. The observations are analyzed in correlation with functional projections in an expanded CP domain. In terms of meaning contributions, based on the Table model of discourse (Farkas and Bruce 2011), the core meaning of dào is captured as contributing to the speaker’s discourse commitment, which marks misalignment between the discourse participants’ beliefs. The findings suggest viable formal frameworks for explaining the distribution, meaning, and pragmatic effect of discourse particles.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.General meaning and properties of S-internal DisPs
    • 2.1Meaning contributions and discourse effects
    • 2.2General properties
  • 3.Syntactic properties of S-internal DisPs
    • 3.1Linear order in the clause
    • 3.2DisPs in embedded clauses
  • 4.Meaning contribution of S-internal DisPs
    • 4.1Discourse components and the table model
    • 4.2 Marking unexpectedness : The particle dào
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References:
Published online: 13 April 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.272.18wei
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