Grammaticalization of shuo and jiang in Singapore mandarin Chinese: A spoken-corpus-based study

Abstract

This study investigates the extended grammatical uses of the speech act verbs shuō ‘say’ and jiǎng ‘say’ in Singapore Mandarin Chinese (SMC). With data from a contemporary spoken corpus, the study finds that while both and are major speech act verbs in SMC, has been more grammatically expanded than not only in SMC, but also in its counterparts, namely other Mandarin varieties and Chinese dialects. The extension has been motivated by both language-external and language-internal factors. The findings of this study will contribute not only to the typology of speech act verbs and their grammaticalization in general, but also to the study of language variations and changes.