Vol 28, No 4 (2024): Discourse-pragmatic markers of (inter)subjective stance in Asian languages: With special focus on Chinese etymons

This special issue is concerned with languages belonging to the Sinosphere, a region where China played an important geo-political and cultural leadership role. It aims to trace areal effects that the impact of Chinese had on the languages of the region over centuries. It deals with a number of words of Chinese origin used in Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and Thai, as well as Chinese and investigates theoretically significant issues related to language contact, discourse-pragmatic aspects of language change, and socio-cultural influence on language development, among others, as exemplified in the development of discourse markers from their earlier lexical expressions originating from Chinese etyma. The nine contributions presented in this special issue have a number of things in common, in particular the following. First, they deal in some way or other with areal effects that the impact of Chinese had on these languages over centuries. Second, their goal is to achieve linguistic reconstruction, tracing present-day patterns of language use back to earlier states of language use. Third, linguistic reconstruction is restricted to linguistic material that was responsible for the rise and development of new patterns of discourse organization. Fourth, the tool most commonly employed for achieving reconstructions is grammaticalization theory. And finally, a central concern of the authors contributing to this special issue is with understanding the role played by discourse markers in linguistic development - how they arose and developed into what they are today. This special issue demonstrates that the languages figuring in it have received substantial influence from Chinese through written texts.

Discourse structuring markers, and, more generally, discourse markers, are known to be sensitive to their positions, often favoring the clause-initial position. On a diachronic dimension, some discourse structuring markers emerge at the clause-initial position and move to occur the clause-medial position at a later stage of their development, whereas some do not exhibit such positional shifts. The factors that enable such positional shifts have not yet been identified, and this study intends to fill the gap. This study collected discourse structuring markers attested in Chinese historical data from various sources and traced their developmental paths, focusing on their occurrence positions. Two groups of markers, i.e., the shènzhì (甚至) ‘even’ group and the bùguò (不过) ‘however, but’ group, exhibited a marked contrast in terms of their meanings and developmental patterns. An analysis led to the conclusion that the shift from the clause-initial to clause-medial positions is correlated with the presence of the speaker-oriented meanings; those with the speaker-oriented meanings (the shènzhì -group) shifted their positions, whereas those without such meanings (the bùguò- group) did not. This hypothesized correlation between the speaker-oriented meaning and the positional shift was examined with discourse structuring markers in English, which supported our hypothesis. Further research is needed to ascertain the crosslinguistic validity of the hypothesis, but at the current level of analysis, there is a strong indication that the presence or absence of the speaker-oriented meanings in the discourse structuring markers is the semantic determinant of their positional shift.

This study traces the development of the adverb shinni ‘truly’, a hybrid form consisting of the Sino-Japanese noun shin (眞/真) ‘truth’ and the adverbializer -ni of Japanese origin, in the history of Japanese. The goal of the study is to compare the developmental pathway of shinni with that of ‘truth’-related words derived from the same Chinese word 眞/真 in Chinese, Korean, and Thai in order to seek commonalities and differences among them. In these languages, it is reported that some words with眞/真 have developed from “true” to “intensive”, and have further developed a number of interactional functions as discourse markers (DMs). The data were obtained from various historical and modern corpora and database. A total of 1810 occurrences of shinni in written and spoken Japanese of various genres were analysed with the focus on their pragmatic function. The study confirms a commonality in the development from “true” to “intensive” in shinni , illustrating its evolution from the noun shin (“true”) to the use of shinni that can be interpreted as serving to intensify the illocutionary force of what is being said (i.e., “intensive”). In contrast, this study finds that shinni does not bear any DM functions that some words with眞/真in Chinese, Korean, and Thai have developed. This study discussed the possibility that, due to various factors, the pace of change at advanced stages of grammaticalization may be more diversified than has previously been suggested.

This study delves into the semantic evolution of the Korean lexeme seysang . Despite its rich functional development, seysang has received limited attention in grammaticalization research. This study addresses this gap by exploring its extended meanings and functional shifts in Korean. It aims to trace the transformation of seysang from a historical noun to its role as a contemporary discourse marker (DM) which conveys a range of pragmatic meanings, marking the speaker’s emotions and stances. Using historical and contemporary corpora, including data spanning from the 15th century to modern media, this paper qualitatively analyzes the grammaticalization process of seysang while quantitatively examining the discourse functions of seysangey . The analysis particularly focuses on seysangey ’s positional flexibility within Left Periphery (LP), Right Periphery (RP), and stand-alone positions, and its preference in positive, negative, and neutral contexts. This study further investigates whether seysangey ’s LP and RP functions align with previous research, which associates LP with subjectification and RP with intersubjectification. The analyses indicate that seysangey exhibits both subjectification and intersubjectification across LP, RP, and stand-alone positions. Findings reveal that seysang has expanded to signify broader social spaces, from birth-to-death spans and societal environments beyond enclosed communities to symbolic meanings of people’s hearts and the earthly realm. It also functions adverbially as ‘very’ (degree modifier) and ‘at all’ (negative polarity item). In Contemporary Korean, seysangey operates as a flexible DM marking subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and speaker stance, providing insight into the complexities of language evolution and external influences shaping the Korean lexicon and grammar.

Borrowed lexemes developing into discourse markers (DMs) are uniquely valuable research topics from contact linguistic and grammaticalization perspectives. Although a large number of Sino-Thai lexemes are commonly used, there has not been any serious attempt to analyze such lexemes. The aim of this study is to describe diverse discourse functions of the Sino-Thai lexemes involving ciŋ ‘true’ drawing upon corpus data, to analyze their development with respect to grammaticalization mechanisms, to identify their DM properties, to compare with the developments reported in other languages, and to construct a conceptual-functional network. The data obtained from diverse sources, including historical and contemporary dictionaries, online resources, reference grammars, contemporary corpora, among others show that the lexeme ciŋ ‘true’ denotes ‘true, truth, real’ (objective meaning) as a lexical word, but it also functions adverbially as an intensifier marking ‘surely, definitely’ (subjective meaning) which is a natural development of its lexical meaning. In the domain of discourse, the lexeme acquired a number of interactional functions (intersubjective meaning). A review of the Thai DMs based on ciŋ ‘true’ (truth-DMs) in light of grammaticalization parameters shows that changes characterizable as desemanticization, extension, and decategorialization are observable, whereas erosion is either not observed or its reverse is often found. Despite variable degrees of semantic bleaching, the semantic change in the movement from objective to subjective, and further to intersubjective meanings, is prominent. The functional similarity between truth-DMs across languages notwithstanding, the differences are much greater. These findings contribute to the understanding of the role of source semantics as well as its limits in the developmental paths of DMs.