Form (Prosody)-Meaning (Pragmatics) pairings of discourse markers: A case study of Nǐ zhīdào (‘You Know’) as a construction in Chinese media interviews

Abstract

This article makes the first empirical corpus-based study of the actual performance of the discourse marker (DM) nǐ zhīdào (NZ) in Chinese media interview conversations from the perspective of synchronic Construction Grammar (CxG).¹ The main objective is to pair the prosody of NZ at varying utterance positions (‘form’ properties at prosodic and discourse structural levels) with its pragmatic functions (‘meaning’ properties at the discourse communicative level), to enhance our understanding within the existing literature, specifically in relation to pragmatics in spontaneous speech, and provide implications for the broader study of discourse markers. The analysis of the ‘form’ properties of NZ reveals distinct, context-specific attributes of such prosodic metrics as duration, tempo, pause, F₀, and intensity at varying utterance positions; the analysis of its ‘meaning’ properties discovers pragmatic functions with characteristic utterance distributions; and the form-meaning pairing between prosody and pragmatics highlights the roles of prosody in deciphering and materializing pragmatics and of pragmatics in underlying and motivating prosody. This study has shown that insights gained from CxG can enhance our understanding of the fields of pragmatics, discourse, and interaction, and specific linguistic phenomena whose importance has been entrenched in these domains can be sufficiently explained using CxG. It follows that the notion of construction can be extended to the discourse (e.g., dialogue and conversation) level to approach the complexities of spoken language and address diverse elusive pragmatic issues like DMs effectively.