Guiding assertions and questions in discourse: Mandarin dique and zhende
Mengxi Yuan, Yurie Hara
July 2018 

This paper explores how discourse markers contribute to the update of discourse through a detailed study of Mandarin dique ‘indeed’ and zhende ‘really’. On the basis of empirical data and a naturalness rating experiment, we show that dique and zhende make similar yet different contributions to discourse updates. Dique presupposes that its prejacent issue is old, while zhende presupposes that its prejacent issue is old and that some discourse participant has failed to resolve this issue. Furthermore, dique and zhende can embed both assertions and questions. This supports Farkas & Bruce’s (2010) Table stack model, which provides a uniform treatment for assertions and questions.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/004153 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Natural Language and LInguistic Theory
keywords:	speech acts, discourse structure, common ground, table stack, presupposition, mandarin, semantics
Downloaded:	386 times

 

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