Discourse Markers of “Saying”: A Comparative Study

Abstract The present study compares the discourse markers (DMs) of “saying” in Mandarin Chinese ke yi shuo (lit. “can say”) and ying gai shuo (lit. “should say”) with their equivalents in English, by drawing the parallel corpora from The Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping (Volume III) (henceforth The Works), so as to uncover the pragmatic motivation for the variation in translating the DMs of “saying.” The analysis is conducted within a theoretical framework of speech act theory, by grouping the DMs according to their personal pronouns. Moreover, by comparing the uses of personal pronouns in English and Chinese, the current study confirms that The Works keeps the consistency between the two languages as well as with the characteristics and styles of Deng Xiaoping’s locution. It also finds that modalized DMs of “saying” (e. g., “I should say”), as a parenthesis, lose their status as matrix clauses and help reduce the tone of affirmation.