The development of the Chinese discourse marker and expressive wanle

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.