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  • Investigating the Interacti...
    Shan, Yi

    Frontiers in psychology, 12/2021, Letnik: 12
    Journal Article

    This study briefly describes the prosodic and pragmatic characteristics of the discourse marker ("you know") in spoken Chinese. It mainly explores the interaction between its prosody and pragmatics using instrumental methods. It is the first attempt to use acoustic and statistical analysis to examine the prosodic parameters and prosody-pragmatics interaction of a Chinese discourse marker. The corpus includes 71 interview conversations totaling more than 30 h, in which 490 discourse marker tokens of were found. mainly fulfilled four broad pragmatic functions of initiating a topic when occurring sentence-initially, of holding the floor when appearing within clauses, of marking coherence when making its presence between clauses, and of projecting attitudes and feelings when showing up sentence-finally. Drawing on the algorithm of random forest in R, the acoustic and statistical analysis of the performance of in these four functions showed that its prosodic features, including duration, tempo, pre-pause, post-pause, F , and intensity, significantly relate to and thus imply its pragmatic functions, that the interaction between its prosody and pragmatics can be modeled statistically, and that the established pragmatics classification model based on prosody can be utilized to predict the pragmatics of . These findings seem to strengthen the hypothesis that prosodic variables play a role in deciphering the different pragmatic functions of . This study uses prosodic evidence to more objectively reveal not only the part of in dynamically constructing and embodying specific contexts but also its communicative functions and the underlying meta-pragmatic awareness behind it. This study breaks through the limitations of traditional discourse marker research, which mainly relies on context and discourse characteristics for subjective reasoning.