Quantifying Syntactic-Prosodic Patterns
Yi Shan, Weiwei Chu · 2025
This chapter presents quantitative findings on the discourse marker (DM) ni zhidao from corpus data. It examines the distribution of ni zhidao across utterance positions, noting its tendency to occur medially and finally, contrary to Western assumptions about DMs. The analysis covers prosodic features including speech rate, pause duration, pitch, and intensity in different utterance positions, using Independent Samples Tests to identify significant differences. Interrelationships among prosodic features are also explored. This quantitative analysis sets the foundation for a subsequent qualitative examination of ni zhidao , which will investigate its semantic status, pragmatic functions, and the connections between its positioning, prosody, semantics, and functions. The chapter provides a comprehensive overview of ni zhidao &s;s usage patterns and prosodic characteristics, challenging existing assumptions and paving the way for a deeper understanding of this DM in the Chinese language.