Analysis on the Pragmatic Functions of Chinese Discourse Marker “haojiahuo”

Abstract

“好家伙” (haojiahuo) as the network buzzword in 2020 has been widely used both online and offline. The study attempts to make an analysis of how and why people use the discourse marker “好家伙” from the adaptation-pragmatic perspective. Through analyzing the blogs collected from Weibo, it is found that people use “好家伙” on Weibo as a means of adaptation to contexts consisting of communicative and linguistic contexts. To be more specific, language user employs “好家伙” as a dynamic process to adapt to the mental, social and physical world as well as specific linguistic contexts. As a result, the functions of “好家伙” in the adaptation process can be summarized as follows: managing topics, constructing discourse, expressing emotions, filing speech blanks and mitigating face threats. The first two are discourse functions, and the last three belong to interpersonal functions.