Bunction and Formation Mechanism of Discourse Marker ‘Kebushi’

Abstract

This paper discussed ‘kebushi’ from three aspects : syntactic distribution, discourse function and formation mechanism. Firstly, fromthe aspect of syntactic distribution, through the statistics of the corpus, it is found that the occurrence of ‘kebushi’ is slightly higher than that of ‘kebu’, and the use of ‘kebushi’ and ‘kebu’ is higher than that of ‘kebushi ma’ and ‘lebushi me’, because ‘kebushi’ and ‘kebu’ themselves have a rhetorical tone. ‘Kebushi’ can be combined with ‘na’ to form the form of ‘na kebushi’, but it can not be combined with ‘zhe’. ‘Kebushi’ can appear in the dialogue, sentence groups or clauses. When it appears in the conversation, it can occupy the position of the beginning of the turn, but it can not be located in the position of the first turn. Secondly, from the perspective of pragmatic functions, this paper discusses the functions of ‘kebushi’ such as turn taking markers, response markers, attitude markers and topic markers. Finally, this paper investigates the formation mechanism of ‘kebushi’. ‘Kebuei’ first appeared in the Ming Dynasty as a response, and with the loss of later grammatical components, ‘kebushi’ began to be used independently in the Qing Dynasty to express the speaker