The Grammaticalization of Contrastive Expressions: A Comparative Study between Chinese and Japanese spoken discourse

    To date, a number of studies have explained contrastive expressions in Chinese as well as in Japanese from syntactic and semantic perspectives. However, as indicated in previous studies, it is insufficient to analyze... [ view full abstract ]

    To date, a number of studies have explained contrastive expressions in Chinese as well as in Japanese from syntactic and semantic perspectives. However, as indicated in previous studies, it is insufficient to analyze the functions of connectives only on phrasal level. To gain a full understanding of how such connectives function, analysis based on the whole discourse is required. The present study is a comparative analysis between Chinese and Japanese contrastive expressions, aiming to show the distinction between them. Under the grammaticalization model proposed by Traugott(1982), this study first made an attempt to show the specific properties of the contrastive expressions used in daily conversation through a qualitative analysis of examples building on the research methods of discourse analysis. In conversations, it was found that both Chinese and Japanese contrastive expressions can be used to introduce a new topic or to indicate a change of topic, which is accepted as a result of grammaticalization, while the issue of the variation in terms of the degrees of grammaticalization across Chinese and Japanese contrastive expressions remains undiscussed. This paper took a quantitative approach to investigate the degrees of grammaticalization of the contrastive expressions using the conversation data collected from Chinese and Japanese native speakers who are college students. It appears that some of the contrastive expressions have not been grammaticalized. The results also showed that compared with Chinese contrastive expressions, Japanese contrastive expressions have a tendency to exhibit relatively high degree of grammaticalization. Through comparative analysis, this study takes a closer look at the properties of the contrastive expressions in both Chinese and Japanese, and is expected to provide helpful suggestions to Japanese learning as well as cross-cultural communication. In addition, this issue needs not only synchronic description, but also diachronic analyses. Thus, based on the results obtained before, this paper will also look back and check the usage in the past, and try to compare with the current usage.