Diachronic change and synchronic variation of the Chinese discourse marker shishishang

Abstract

This article discusses shishishang in Mandarin Chinese with three major objectives: (1) to describe the diachronic grammaticalisation process of shishishang from an adverbial phrase to a discourse marker based on the CCL corpus; (2) to investigate the structural and semantic properties of shishishang in Mandarin Chinese; and (3) to analyse the discourse-pragmatic functions of the discourse marker shishishang focusing on its ideational, textual, and interpersonal functions. With the method of corpus retrieval and sorting, this article finds that shishishang, as a discourse marker, has three kinds of functions: semantic connection, textual cohesion, and interpersonal function, which originate from its diachronic development.