Mandarin Adverbial Jiu in Discourse

1.0. Introduction I was motivated to conduct this study by an almost omnipresent, multi-functional, and sometimes semantically illusive marker jiu in verbal interactions. Almost all the linguists who study jiu put jiu and cai together and investigate the contrastive semantic meanings, pragmatic functions and conversational implicatures of these two markers in contrastive perspective. But such a comparative study cannot help us understand the behavior of jiu in conversations. If we pay a little attention to the daily conversations around, we may get an impression that the frequency of the occurrence of jiu is much higher than that of cai. In Liu's (1993) study, the total number of occurrences of jiu in her 255-minute spoken corpus is 291, whereas that of cai is only 29. 1 I do not intend to argue against their theoretical approaches; to the contrary, their detailed and theoretically consistent accounts of these two markers provide me with a solid base to investigate the behavior of jiu in our verbal interactions. 2.0. Literature Review Biq (1984) and (1988) are the most detailed studies on identifying adverbial functions of jiu and cai. She exemplifies a well-organized study that is carefully defined along the lines of modem linguistic theories. She consistently identifies and distinguishes the different usages in terms of one descriptive parameter (i.e. the scope of focus), and contrasts the two markers with one explanatory principle (i.e. scalar implicature based on Gricean maxims). She categorizes the various occurrences of jiu and cai into four types of usage: parametric usage, limiting usage, emphatic usage, temporal usage. In each usage, jiu and cai place a different type of focus on some element involved in speech. Cai/jiu can have four different kinds of focus: (1) temporal setting of the narrated event. (2) parametric: the circumstances determining the actuation of the event; (3) the emphatic: the event itself; (4) limiting: some element internal to the event. And cai/jiu are distinguished from each other by the implicatures they carry. In addition to further exploring the adverbial functions of jiu and cai in spoken discourse, Liu's study also extends the grarnmaticalization processes of the two markers, including the