The development of the Chinese expressive zhenshide: A diachronic constructional approach

Abstract

This paper focuses on the expressive zhenshide in Modern Chinese as well as how it came into being from the perspectives of constructionalization and multiple sources. The string zhen shi de ‘really yes’ is used as an emphatic positive response to confirm the prior proposition, and an expressive that expresses speaker's negative attitude at the utterance time (Potts, 2005, 2007). From a constructional perspective, the expressive construction [zhenshide]*[expressive] is instantiated in use by constructs and can be combined with other constructions such as NPs and adverbs, e.g. NP zhenshide, ke/ye zhenshide. There have been works focusing on its semantics and pragmatic function, but none of them discusses its historical development. With a diachronic constructional approach, I argue that the emergence of the expressive construction may have involved multiple sources, specifically that the form was inherited from the emphatic positive response but the function was influenced by the copular construction [zhen COP VP/S]*[negative evaluation] via analogization. Once the expressive construction came into being, it was attested combined with NPs and adverbs. The occurrence of these combinations was by hypothesis partially analogized to the copular construction [(NP) (ADV) zhen COP VP/S]*[negative evaluation].