Edited by Wei Wang
[Studies in Chinese Language and Discourse 13] 2020
► pp. 37–58
This study presents a corpus-based analysis of the pragmatic identification and functional modification of Chinese conversational narrative marker (henceforth CNM). Adopting a three-dimensional design from pragmatic-semantic-cognitive views of CNM, the present study proposes that a CNM is a linking device establishing the narrator’s subjective attitude to introduce his/her narrative intent. The study has extracted “ranhou” from the author’s self-constructed Chinese conversational narratives corpus, which comprises 15 pieces of casual talks by 38 adult native speakers of Chinese. The study has found that (1) semantically, CNM holds the cohesion-oriented function for introducing referential default and semantic default; (2) pragmatically, CNM plays an interactive role between the discourse sequentiality and contextual inference demonstrating the economy of language and salience of semantic representation; (3) cognitively, the intentional cognitive cooperation between the narrator and the listener have been revealed by CNM.
Article language: Chinese