A Study On The Discourse Marker "Zai Shuo(再说)" In Terms Of Types Of Functions And Semantic Relationships

Guided by the theories of semantic grammar,discourse linguistics,cognitive linguistics,and functional linguistics,this paper takes the high-frequency expression"Zai Shuo(再说)"in modern Chinese as the study object,and carries out the discussion from the discourse function,discourse choice,semantic relationship and pragmatic function perspectives.First of all,from the perspective of discourse function,the discourse marker"Zai Shuo(再说)"acts as an additional marker and has the supplementary function in discourse expression.According to the different semantic scenes and supplementary objects,the supplementary functions of"Zai Shuo(再说)"can be divided into the reason-type supplementary and the evidence-type supplementary.Secondly,from the point of view of discourse choice,the supplementary marker"Zai Shuo(再说)"is often matched with declarative sentences expressing facts or knowledge,and sometimes with interrogative sentences with no doubt,but cannot be matched with imperative sentences and exclamatory sentences.Third,from the perspective of semantic relationship,the relationship between the supplementary sentence S2 and the basic sentence S1 can only be the parallel supplementary expressing the parallel relationship,the progressive supplementary expressing forward relationship,or the complementary different-perspective relationship.Finally,from the perspective of pragmatic functions,the pragmatic functions of"Zai Shuo(再说)"in reason-type supplementary and the evidence-type supplementary are not identical.In the reason-type supplementary,the pragmatic function of"Zai Shuo再说"is to increase the comprehensiveness of the speaker’s utterance;in the evidence-type supplementary,the pragmatic function of"Zai Shuo(再说)"is to increase the sufficiency of the speaker’s discourse argument.