Pragmatic Functions of Mandarin Chinese Utterance-initial Particles: A Case Study of Eh2 and Oh in Social Interactions

• Main Authors: Ching-Wei Hsu, 許靖瑋
• Other Authors: Chiarung Lu
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/x79s5z

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 語言學研究所 === 104 === Studies on particles and their uses in Mandarin Chinese have been quite robust throughout the past and present. Apart from formal focus, many of these Mandarin Chinese particle studies have treated the various pragmatic functions of particles as linguistic manifestations reflecting speakers’ cognitive status. Among these, the sentence-final particles (so-called SFPs) in Mandarin Chinese especially call for linguists’ attention owing both to their positional predictability and pragmatic varieties. However, rather few studies (Wu, 1997; 2014; Tsai, 2008) take interest in particle use in utterance-initial position in Mandarin Chinese on the contrary. Moreover, such particle use is seldom investigated into in various different speech genres (e.g., talk-in-interaction, TV talk shows, and monologue narratives). In light of the aforementioned, the current thesis aims to excavate how Utterance-initial Particles (hereafter UIPs) manifest themselves in real-world language data and how speakers socially and pragmatically interact with the aid of UIPs in context. The two targeted frequently-adopted UIPs – Eh2 and Oh – are inspected through three different discourse channels – (1) talk-in-interaction manifestations through spoken corpora; (2) transcriptions of TV talk shows; (3) monologue narratives of story-retelling. The uses of UIP in these different speech genres are analyzed based on research methods of discourse analysis and conversation analysis. The general analytic framework is inspired by Fischer (2006a) and its spectrum of models dedicated to the polyfunctionality of discourse particles, and it hinges upon rather monosemous approach to polyfunctionality. The dispersed outcomes of UIP adoption on the surface are looking forward to being confined by the current analytic framework. Instead of claiming polysemy for the diverse pragmatic functions UIPs exhibit, by incorporating the speech genre features and the interactions between speakers and co-participants, we will be able to elicit the core features Mandarin Chinese speakers encode in UIPson the cognitive level. The analyses of the present study firstly present the discourse manifestations of Eh2. On the cognitive level where we can suggest speakers’ different epistemic statuses, Eh2-prefacing foretells discovery, unexpectedness, and wonder in regard to the reaction time. Pragmatically on the discursive level, in conversational discourse these epistemic stages render default pragmatic functions like attention marking, surprise marking, and interrogation initiation. On the other hand, in TV talk shows, there are other pragmatic functions such as self-generate adjacency pair, plot twist setting, and speaker’s turn modulation, and these are merely variants of Eh2-encoded modality and knowledge states. Similarly we also see such functions in Eh2-prefacing in monologue narratives data, and Eh2 can also aid in the speakers’ memory retrieval through self-repair. Notably when there is a negative cue, speaker’s take with respect to the reaction time begets implications of urgency to refute and reproachment respectively. Secondly, the researched counterpart Oh on the cognitive level conveys information recipience and speakers’ reasoning/understanding process in regard to the reaction time. On the discursive level, these epistemic statuses are not just encoded as recipience acknowledgement, but also as emotional states ranging from calmness, indifference, to unfriendliness based on how co-participants interpret it. These core elements of Oh in TV talk shows further provide the speakers with pragmatic tools to coordinate speech sequence and narrative track-keeping. Moreover, in monologue narratives, the feature of reasoning/understanding further suggests narrator’s planned speech signal. Unlike Eh2 in negative contexts, which conveys stronger sense of negation, Oh at this end presents mild or euphemized refutations. The present thesis not only presents an in-depth investigation into UIP use in Mandarin Chinese and the pragmatic functions in social interactions, but also contributes to a systematic presentation of synchronic UIP use on different levels. Delicate and complicated pragmatic functions in various different speech genres can be systematically attributed back to several invariant core cognitive statuses each UIP idiosyncratically conveys. The current thesis also opens new directions for the future particle studies so as to the complexity of linguistic intercourses and human cognition.