Textualization of "say": A functional analysis of shuo-connectives in Chinese

Abstract

The semantic and syntactic feature of the character shuo has been one of the central issues explored by scholars who study Chinese. However, none of their studies systematically survey why and how shuo occurs in connectives. Under the theoretical framework of SFG, this paper first introduces some critical notions of semantic domain and primitive morpheme, which help to interpret why shuo is manifested in varied grammatical environments. Then a dichotomy of lexicalized and grammaticalized shuo-connectives is proposed to illustrate how shuo "moves"into conjunctive items. A close analysis of some peculiar shuo-connectives indicates that (1) shuo marks the internal process in lexicalized items; and (2) shuo may serve as internal process, impersonal projecting process and conditional binder in grammaticalized items. It is argued that the current framework of projection semantic domain should be fine-tuned so as to take the textual manifestation into account.