On the development of evidential ‘say’ in Chinese

Abstract

The Chinese language is known for its rich inventory of sentence final particles to mark speaker stance. Recent work has identified a number of sources for these particles, among them nominalizers, psych verbs and quotative ‘say’ verbs. In this paper we will focus on final particles derived from ‘say’ verbs in a number of Chinese dialects—namely, Cantonese wo (< waa), Taiwanese kong, and Mandarin shuo (e.g. Leung 2006, Simpson & Wu 2002, and Wang et. al 2003) as in (1) to (3) respectively. In particular, we extend beyond previous studies to examine the evolution of these ‘say’ verbs into evidential markers, and elucidate subtle differences in evidential meaning across different dialects. In addition to the influence of language-internal factors, we will also examine the effect of contact-induced semantic extensions. Given that the use of Mandarin shuo as an evidential marker is an emerging phenomenon, we will also elaborate on the social context that facilitates its development. Data for our analysis were obtained via questionnaires, interviews, and a number of online spoken corpora (e.g. the Hong Kong University Cantonese Corpus, the National Chengchi University Corpus of Spoken Chinese, etc.).