Diachronic Research on Chinese Discourse Markers in China: Looking Back and Moving Forward

Abstract

Diachronic research on discourse markers (DMs) has gained momentum in recent years, but the international community has only seen a few studies on the evolution of Chinese discourse markers (CDMs). One crucial reason is that many diachronic studies on CDMs are published in Chinese-written journals and have escaped international audiences. To address this gap, this paper reviews the diachronic studies of CDMs from scholars who are housed in Chinese and English language departments in China. The results show that research on CDMs is both benefited from and complicated by mixing the Chinese tradition of exegetical studies and the Western tradition of grammaticalization, lexicalization, and pragmaticalization. Second, conceptual ambiguities lead scholars to reach different conclusions on the evolutionary process of the same CDM. Third, accounting for the entire evolutionary process of CDMs needs to take an interdisciplinary perspective or a holistic view and analyze more than a single interface but jointly consider the linguistic facts at the interfaces of grammar, semantics, and pragmatics. Therefore, scholars must move away from conceptual arguments and focus on the linguistic facts of Chinese language evolution.