Abstract
Mirativity has been gradually recognized as a distinct semantic and grammatical category whose fundamental function is to illustrate information which is new or surprising to the speaker or hearer. Each language has its mirative expressions. This paper mainly discusses the mirative use of “怎么 [zěnme]” in Mandarin Chinese. It distinguishes between “zěnme 1”, “zěnme 2” and “zěnme 3”, and points out that “zěnme 2” and “zěnme 3” can express mirative meaning. Especially, “zěnme 3”, which is grammaticalized from “zěnme 2”, can be viewed as an independent marker of mirativity in Mandarin Chinese. In addition, this paper reveals that the semantic consequence of the mirative use of “zěnme” is promoting the rhetorical question to form negative meaning.
This research is sponsored by the National Social Science Fund Major Project “Chinese parataxis characteristic research and large knowledge base and corpus construction under the background of international Chinese language education” (Approval No.: 12&ZD175). I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Li Qiang, WU Guoxiang, Liu Hongchao, Li Wanjun, Lin Tao and Liu Yuan for their suggestions to this paper.
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Liu, B. (2015). The Mirative Use of “怎么[Zěnme]” in Mandarin Chinese and Its Semantic Consequence. In: Lu, Q., Gao, H. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9332. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27194-1_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27194-1_8
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