Two Discourse Markers-Na and Ranhou in Chinese Spoken Discourse

• Main Authors: Xiou-Ru Lin, 林曉茹
• Other Authors: Fung-Fu Tsao
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2000
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/79676797697960002114

碩士 === 國立清華大學 === 語言學研究所 === 88 === The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the functions of Na and Ranhou, the most frequently used two, in Chinese spoken discourse. When we come to our corpus, which mainly comes from recordings of daily conversations, our first observation is that Na can occur in the highly interactive conversation or in the monologue context, while Ranhou always appears in a long segment of monologue. We analyze their functions in terms of the model adapted from Birmingham school, which posited a rank scale at the level of discourse. We propose Na is a marker of an information transition point. We see the distributions of Na in Initiation, Response and Follow-up moves, which compose the exchange structure in the highly interactive conversation. We also examine Ranhou and Na''s functions in the monologue. On the basis of Halliday''s logical-semantic relations between clauses, we examine Ranhou and Na''s occurrences in the move complex, and discuss the relations which are connected by Ranhou and Na. We propose Ranhou is a marker of sequence; Ranhou serves to denote the upcoming unit as one element of a certain sequential relations. At the end of this stu