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.
Highlights
IntroductionDiscourse markers (e.g., ni zhidao, you know, etc.) are linguistic items to guide the communicator’s understanding of the discourse during the communicative process
In essence, discourse markers are linguistic items to guide the communicator’s understanding of the discourse during the communicative process
Given the current state of research, this study aims to statistically examine and model the interaction between the prosody and pragmatics of the discourse marker ni zhidao in Chinese spontaneous speech based on a corpus of media interview conversations totaling more than 30 h
Summary
Discourse markers (e.g., ni zhidao, you know, etc.) are linguistic items to guide the communicator’s understanding of the discourse during the communicative process. Researchers (e.g., Blakemore, 1987; Fraser, 1987; Schiffrin, 1987; Chen, 2002; He and Mo, 2002; Ran, 2002; Fang, 2005; Wu, 2005; Tanno, 2018; Rhee, 2020) have primarily relied on context and syntax to examine the multiple pragmatic functions of specific discourse markers in different contexts, or to analyze how discourse markers perform certain discourse functions in specific contexts within some theoretical frameworks These investigations need to be further developed and refined for four reasons: (1) over-relying on abstract communicative contexts for subjective reasoning; (2) lacking sufficient linguistic evidence due to investigation into only a small number of examples; (3) failing to statistically investigate the interaction between “tangible” prosody and “intangible” function of discourse markers; (4) mainly using elicited conversations as data and paying little or even no attention to spontaneous speech
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