Study On Discourse Markers Expressing Concession And Compromise:“Yeba” And “Yehao”

In modern Chinese,the discourse markers both expressing concession and compromise including Yeba and Yehao belong to a pair of synonymous discourse markers.Most of Chinese dictionaries have interpreted Yehao same as Yeba to show tolerance and concession.But through research,we have found that they cannot be replaced by each other which shows that there are differences between the two.There are not enough conclusions and comparisons in former studies and the existing Chinese dictionaries have not distinguished these two words which will make foreign students confuse.Therefore,this paper has attempted to use three-dimensional grammar theories,discourse marker theory and systemic functional linguistics theory to compare & analyze the similarities and differences of these two discourse markers from syntax,semantics and pragmatics aspects in order to help foreign students grasp the usage of two discourse markers precisely.Firstly,we will use a large amount of corpus to describe the syntax and semantics of two concessional discourse markers including Yeba and Yehao by means of combination for form and meaning.Meanwhile,we have investigated the pragmatic functions of these two words with systemic functional linguistics theory.Through illustration,we have found that both of them can be seen at the beginning and middle from syntactic distribution aspect.Furthermore,in syntactic collocation,the collocation of Yehao with modal particles is more complex than that of Yeba.In terms of semantic function,although both Yeba and Yehao can express the meaning of concession and compromise,their core semantics are different since Yeba means abandonment and Yehao means identification.Finally,we have compared the pragmatic functions of Yeba or Yehao from textual & interpersonal function and found that there are different tendencies in their emotional expression.