Investigating the Interaction Between Prosody and Pragmatics Quantitatively: A Case Study of the Chinese Discourse Marker ni zhidao (“You Know”)

Abstract

This study briefly describes the prosodic and pragmatic characteristics of the discourse marker ni zhidao (“you know”) in spoken Chinese. It mainly explores the interaction between its prosody and pragmatics using instrumental methods. It is the first attempt to use acoustic and statistical analysis to examine the prosodic parameters and prosody-pragmatics interaction of a Chinese discourse marker. The corpus includes 71 interview conversations totaling more than 30 h, in which 490 discourse marker tokens of ni zhidao were found. Ni zhidao mainly fulfilled four broad pragmatic functions of initiating a topic when occurring sentence-initially, of holding the floor when appearing within clauses, of marking coherence when making its presence between clauses, and of projecting attitudes and feelings when showing up sentence-finally. Drawing on the algorithm of random forest in R, the acoustic and statistical analysis of the performance of ni zhidao in these four functions showed that its prosodic features, including duration, tempo, pre-pause, post-pause, F0, and intensity, significantly relate to and thus imply its pragmatic functions, that the interaction between its prosody and pragmatics can be modeled statistically, and that the established pragmatics classification model based on prosody can be utilized to predict the pragmatics of ni zhidao. These findings seem to strengthen the hypothesis that prosodic variables play a role in deciphering the different pragmatic functions of ni zhidao. This study uses prosodic evidence to more objectively reveal not only the part of ni zhidao in dynamically constructing and embodying specific contexts but also its communicative functions and the underlying meta-pragmatic awareness behind it. This study breaks through the limitations of traditional discourse marker research, which mainly relies on context and discourse characteristics for subjective reasoning.

A Domain-Function Analysis of ni zhidao (你知道, “You Know”) in Chinese Simultaneous Speech

“…The sequential and rhetorical domains where we captured ni zhidao align not only well with those included in the DFTM (Crible & Degand, 2019), but also approximately with the exchange and action structures in Schiffrin’s (1987a) discourse coherence model. Our capture of ni zhidao in the ideational, interpersonal, rhetorical, and sequential domains, especially in rhetorical and sequential domains that failed to be captured in relevant studies (Liu, 2006; Shan, 2014a, 2014b, 2015, 2022; Tao, 2003), could contribute to the studies on the multifunctionality of ni zhidao . This finding can highlight the prominent function of domains in the pragmatic variations of MDs: what may vary includes not merely specific functions and discourse coherence relations expressed by DMs, but the types of DM-connected elements and the speaker’s intents as well (Crible & Degand, 2019).…”

“…In other words, ni zhidao is purposefully used in specific contexts to facilitate conveying utterance intentions by establishing proximity, intimacy, and collaboration between interlocutors through confirming common ground, shared background knowledge, assumptions, and presuppositions, and checking the hearer’s understanding. As such, placing ni zhidao within ideational, rhetorical, sequential, and interpersonal domains can advance Shan’s (2022) analysis of ni zhidao. Although Shan (2022), the most systematic ni zhidao study in the literature, illustrates the interpersonal and textual functions of ni zhidao , which are approximate to the interpersonal and ideational domains, respectively, he has not analyzed ni zhidao within the sequential and rhetorical domains.…”

“…As such, placing ni zhidao within ideational, rhetorical, sequential, and interpersonal domains can advance Shan’s (2022) analysis of ni zhidao. Although Shan (2022), the most systematic ni zhidao study in the literature, illustrates the interpersonal and textual functions of ni zhidao , which are approximate to the interpersonal and ideational domains, respectively, he has not analyzed ni zhidao within the sequential and rhetorical domains. This is most possibly because he does not intend to present a quantitative, exhaustive analysis of all ni zhidao tokens in his data, but to randomly exemplify the functions potentially performed by this DM, based on his research objective (Shan, 2022).…”

“…Ideational ni zhidao signals “logico-semantic argumentative relations” (González, 2005, p. 54) between utterance segments. Though characteristic of semantic bleaching (Shan, 2022), it is related to the referential discourse structure, signifying the objective relations between utterance segments and entailing the slightest degree of personal involvement (Crible & Degand, 2019). The rhetorical domain represents the speaker’s communicative intents and facilitates conveying the illocutionary force of discourse (González, 2005).…”

“…Shan (2022) is a comprehensive study, which explores the utterance positions, prosodic performances, semantic features, and pragmatic functions of ni zhidao , with an emphasis on the interaction between these four aspects. In Chinese spontaneous speech, ni zhidao has gradually become formally fixed, phonetically reduced, decategorized (i.e., syntactically detached and flexible, and deprived of syntactic capacities), desemanticized (i.e., semantically empty or bleached), and pragmatically functional (Enghels, 2018; Shan, 2022). These attributes of ni zhidao can be representative of the characteristics of typical Chinese DMs.…”