International Journal of Knowledge www.ijklp.org and Language Processing KLP International ⓒ2014 ISSN 2191-2734 Volume 5, Number 3, 2014 pp.31–-50 The Pragmatic Functions of Turning Discourse Markers: “Danshi(但是)”,“Keshi(可是)” and “Buguo(不过)” Zhang Wei International College of Chinese Studies Shanghai Normal University Shanghai, 200234, China
[email protected] Selected Paper from Chinese Lexical Semantic Workshop 2014 ABSTRACT. In the traditional sense, the conjunction such as “danshi(但是)”, “keshi(可 是)”and “buguo(不过)”,etc. They have little real value semantics and play pragmatic functions in discourse in certain contexts. In this paper, we make a more comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the turning discourse markers as the representative of the words’ pragmatic functions such as discourse organization and convergence, topic or turns conversion and attention causing, etc. Meanwhile, their formation mechanisms and cognitive foundation are included in the paper. Keywords: semantic reduction; Discourse Markers; pragmatic functions; mechanism of formation; cognitive basis 1. Introduction. The consensus of disjunctive relation studies is that the clauses of disjunctive compound sentences are semantically opposite. The disjunctive connective markers include disjunctive conjunctions (eg. “danshi/ dan”, “keshi/ke”, “buguo”, “ran’er” etc.) and adverbs (eg. “que”, “dao” etc.). Academic explorations and researches have already acquired lots of achievements, however most of them focus on the disjunctive words’ functions when expressing truth value semantic relationship in disjunctive compound sentences. By the corpus-based investigation, it’s carried out that in some contexts those disjunctive conjunctions, which express the traditional meaning, such as “danshi”, “keshi” and “buguo” etc., barely have truth value semantics relationship themselves.