Research On Meiyou As Discourse Maker In Chinese Natural Discourse

Discourse markers have become a hot topic in the field of conversation analysis and pragmatics since 1980s. Recently, the research on Chinese discourse makers has drawn many scholars’ attention. The discourse marker meiyou which frequently used in modern Chinese spoken language has been selected as object of this paper. We intend to card its formation and evolution process, but also analyze the motivation and mechanism of the emergence of the discourse marker function in colloquial language based on the theories of conversational analysis, grammaticalization, interactive linguistics and emergent grammar. Furthermore, the characteristics and pragmatic functions of meiyou in the conversation are also investigated in detail, and we also analyze the common law and interconnectedness of negative words evolved into discourse markers between different languages (English, Spanish) in typology terms.This thesis includes six chapters in total:The first chapter is exordium, mainly explains why the author chose this topic, the source of corpus and methods. First is to define the research object and theories, and then the significance of this research is also described systematically.The second chapter mainly introduces the present status of research about meiyou.The property of meiyou in diachronic and synchronic aspects and the negative discourse markers in domestic and foreign sides have been summarized. In addition, the rationality and specific value of this research were also been verified combining with the current research situation.The third chapter focus on demonstrate the revolution process of discourse marker meiyou. First of all, a textual research about the specific period which discourse marker meiyou appeared has been done. And then, we explored the causes and mechanism which meiyou evolved from negative adverbs to the discourse markers according to the grammaticalization evolution law.The fourth chapter describes specifically the location, prosodic, semantic and functional features of meiyou in discourse. We identified the status of meiyou as a discourse marker by analyzing these features, and the pragmatic value of discourse marker has also been discussed.The fifth chapter shows a comparative study of the common features of negative discourse markers meiyou and bushi in Chinese from the perspective of typology, thereby discourse marker function of meiyou had been well-defined. And the common features of negative discourse markers were also been investigated from the typological perspective,from the cross-linguistic perspective, we also explored the common mechanism of negative discourse markers in human language.The sixth chapter is conclusions, including conclusion summaries, supplementary instructions and reasonable prospect of the follow-up study.The main conclusions of this study are as follows:Ⅰ. Some Meiyou have evolved into a discourse marker when used independently in spontaneous speech, and these meiyou which in oral speech share common features on distribution, prosody, semantics and function with other discourse marker.Ⅱ. The function of meiyou as discourse marker result from the interaction of conversational context, high frequency use and interactive subjectivity, and the appearance of discourse markers meiyou is closely related to the frequently interaction between conversation participants .Ⅲ. The discourse function of discourse marker meiyou mainly includes two aspects:discourse organization and interpersonal interaction, the function of discourse organization can be subdivided into the turn-claiming, turn-taking, turn-control and transfer topic, while the interpersonal interaction function including response to praise and gratitude, clarification, and face maintenance.Ⅳ. The case which negative markers evolved into discourse makers in Chinese is not only meiyou discussed in this thesis, so does bushi (Liu2005, Yin2011). This study shows that discourse marker meiyou and bushi have common characteristics on the evolutionary path and formal function, and the two parts are a typical case of the evolution of Chinese negative words into discourse markers. The cross-linguistic also shows that ’no’ in English and ’no, si’ in Spanish also evolved from negative marker into discourse maker, which share the universality of typology.