Dui bu dui as a pragmatic marker: evidence from chinese classrom discourse

Abstract

Seeking evidence from its discursive purposes, its sequential positions in interaction, and the nature of the activity it is situated in, we re-examine the form dui bu dui ‘correct-not-correct’ that was used during four class meetings, a total of six hours, in a Chinese language school. We propose that besides functioning as an A-not-A question, dui bu dui can also be used for pragmatic purposes. We show that appearing at the beginning or the end of TCU, dui bu dui is used as a basic marker to reinforce the illocutionary force of the sentence proposition it is tagged to; whereas at the beginning or as an independent TCU, dui bu dui is used as a discourse marker to signal transitions of interactional sequences at different levels of discourse and to help the speaker maintain the addressee's attention in given activities. Such an approach to analyze the functions of dui bu dui suggests that (a) grammatical meanings in part emerge from interactional contexts, within which speakers construct, validate, or modify each other's meanings on a moment-by-moment basis; and (b) functions of specific language forms can also be assigned by the specific activities the speakers are engaged in.