Thinking as saying: s huo (‘say’) in Taiwan Mandarin conversation and BBS talk

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The research reported here is an attempt to explore the functions of shuo ‘say’ in informal Chinese speech and writing. We further probe into the grammaticalization of shuo, discussing how the various lexical, grammatical and discourse functions have come into being, with reference to the general tendencies of semantic change proposed by Traugott [(1982). In: Lehmann and Malkiel (Eds.) Perspectives on Historical Linguistics. Benjamins, Amsterdam. pp. 245–272; (1989) Language 65(1), 31–55] and Traugott and König [In: Traugott and Heine (Eds.), Approaches to Grammaticalization, Vol. I. John Benjamins, Philadelphia. pp. 189–218], and the metaphor MIND-AS-BODY proposed by Sweetser [(1990). From Etymology to Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge]. The corpus used in this study contains two sets of data: non-face-to-face talk on BBS (the Electronic Bulletin Board System) and face-to-face daily conversation, mainly produced by young people in Taiwan. Our data indicate that shuo, in addition to acting as a complementizer as discussed by S. Huang [On the (almost perfect) identify of speech and thought: Evidence from Chinese dialects. (1982). Paper presented at Fourteenth International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics] and Cheng [(1997). In: Cheng (Ed.), Taiwanese and Mandarin Structures and Their Developmental Trends in Taiwan II: Contacts between Taiwanese and Mandarin and Restructuring of their Synonyms. Yuan-Liou Publishing Co. Taipei. pp. 105–131], can also occur in an utterance-initial position, functioning as a marker of hearsay, and in an utterance-final position, as a marker of counterexpectation or as an intensifier. On the whole, the data suggest that the initial and final shuo's are innovations serving an expressive function. In particular, the lexeme shuo is moving from the propositional level to the expressive level; i.e., it is evolving from a verb meaning ‘say’ that prefaces an utterance conveying information into a discourse marker that encodes the attitude of the speaker toward the proposition.