A constructional account of the development of the Chinese stance discourse marker běnlái

Abstract

This paper examines the emergence of the Chinese adverb běnlái and its further development into a stance discourse marker (sdm). Most previous studies consider the epistemic modal adverb běnlái (‘indeed, truly’) to have originated from the temporal adverb běnlái (‘originally’). Based on the framework of constructionalisation (Traugott and Trousdale 2013) and Van de Velde et al.’s (2013) idea of multiple sources, I argue that the temporal adverb might not have been the only source for the modal běnlái to occur. Furthermore, the modal adverb changed into an sdm, thereby signaling the speaker’s subjective evaluation while linking the coherence of the discourse. I argue that the change was enabled by both subjectification and analogisation. The exemplars to which běnlái was by hypothesis analogised include the extant discourse connectives (e.g., kěshì) and the extant commentary pragmatic markers (e.g., kělián and suǒxìng) (Fraser 2009).