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The development of the Chinese discourse marker and expressive wanle
Author(s)
Date Issued
2022
Journal
ISSN
0378-2166
Citation
Journal of Pragmatics, Feb. 2022, vol. 189, pp. 37-54.
Type
Peer Reviewed Journal Article
Abstract
This paper focuses on the multifunctional non-compositional construction wanle as a discourse marker (DM) and an expressive in Modern Chinese as well as how they came into being in the history of Chinese. There have been a few works on the semantics and pragmatic function of the chunked wanle, however, none of them discusses it from a diachronic constructional perspective, and none has proposed the differences between its use as a DM and as an expressive. Based on the extensive classical data, we argue that even though both the DM and the expressive wanle originated from the inflected change-of-state verb, they developed with different trajectories. From a diachronic constructional point of view, we further argue that the development of the DM and the expressive wanle may have involved multiple mechanisms and multiple inputs.
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