Intensifiers as stance markers : a corpus study on genre variations in Mandarin Chinese

• Main Authors: Lim, Ni-Eng, Hong, Huaqing
• Other Authors: School of Humanities and Social Sciences
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities::Language::Chinese
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/103016; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/19172
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

While the study of Mandarin Chinese intensifiers has been prolific, the methodologies used have been limited to comparative and grammaticalization studies, revealing little about the discourse-pragmatic usages of individual intensifiers. Utilizing a balanced corpus composed of 15 different prototypical genres, the associative strength of 12 commonly used intensifiers in each genre was statistically determined based on their frequency distribution. The results reveal a clear preference pattern of intensifiers across a range of “written” and “spoken”-based genres. Upon the premise that the genre preferences of intensifiers stem from matching dimensions of communicative intent/discourse context between genre and intensifier, genre-analysis was conducted to unveil the core “stances” each intensifier might possibly project. In conclusion, it is argued that genre-analysis based on empirical corpus data provides a valid alternative means to uncover seemingly “covert” aspects of language use.