From informational to emotive use: meiyou (`no') as a discourse marker in Taiwan Mandarin conversation

Abstract

Discourse marker analysis has been widely studied, leading Fraser (1998: 301) to call this subject `a growth market in linguistics'. In our present research, we extended the study of discourse markers to the Chinese marker meiyou, which has traditionally been treated as a negator (e.g. Biq, 1989; Teng, 1973a, 1973b, 1975). The corpus studied here contains 40 conversations, totaling 482'27”. The analytical framework adopted in the study was drawn from van Dijk's model (1979), which mainly consists of a semantic/textual level (i.e. sequences of utterances/propositions) and a pragmatic/interactional level (i.e. speech-acts). A total of 141 occurrences of meiyou were identified as discourse markers in the corpus: 13 of them occur at the textual level and 128 of them at the interactional level. Thus, meiyou occurs more frequently at the interactional level than at the textual level. At the textual level, meiyou introduces an answer to a self-inquiry or self-correction. At the interactional level, meiyou mainly serves as a response to provide information, as a marker of correction/clarification or evasion, and as a response to praise or gratitude. In particular, with respect to meiyou's interactive functions, we use the concepts of preference structure (Sacks et al., 1974) and face-threatening acts (Brown and Levinson, [1978] 1987) to analyze the collected data. We further demonstrate that intersubjectification (Traugott and Dasher, 2002), a mechanism whereby meanings become more centered on the addressee, is involved in the development of the discourse marker meiyou.

Code‐switching and borrowing in Irish1

“…While yeah and no retain their propositional content, it could be argued that the complementary use of the English form followed by an Irish clause expanding on it accords to yeah and no a role as discourse markers, since, according to Fraser (1999) discourse markers are a class of expressions which signal how the speaker intends the basic message that follows to relate to the prior discourse, and their specific interpretation is determined by the context. There is some precedent for looking at no in a discourse marking framework: Wang, Tsai and Ling (2007) extended the study of discourse markers to the Chinese meiyou ‘no’, which has traditionally been treated as a negator.…”

Is formality relevant? Japanese tokenshai,eeandun

“…Many studies on discourse markers and other lexical elements have described their process of grammaticalization and intersubjectification (Onodera 2004;Traugott 2007, Wang, Katz andChen 2003;Wang, Tsai and Ling 2007). It is evident that through this process many lexical items have changed from the propositional to the expressive levels.…”

Restrictiveness, exclusivity, adversativity, and mirativity

“…Ford (2000) points out that it is also considered contrastive when a speaker attempts to repair a misunderstanding after the hearer has responded. The form 'mei(you) ('no') (…) + zhishi + alternative projected answer' (as in examples (11) and (13)) performs an action that runs counter to that projected by the first speaker (for a discussion on meiyou, see Wang, Tsai & Lin 2007;Wang 2008). When zhishi appears with meiyou, it can serve as an informational corrective addressed to an expression either stated or presupposed in a prior turn.…”