담화표지로 사용되는 ‘我想’의 운율적 특징: 일상대화를 중심으로

Abstract

This study aims to provide a detailed description of the prosodic realizations of the discourse marker wo xiang and its prosodic realizations. Using corpus data of the present-day spoken Mandarin Chinese, the prosodic patterns of wo xiang are analyzed and interpreted in context. The findings show that the verb is stressed in more than half of our data. The pronoun is the second most frequently stressed element, while only one is entirely unstressed. In conversations, the degree of a word or phrase’s prosodic prominence is directly related to its informativeness. Prosodic prominence is typically lessened when there is a loss of semantic weight in favor of pragmatic meaning. Wo xiang is prosodically prominent when it expresses an epistemic stance of certainty or uncertainty towards a proposition, but it loses prominence when it has an interpersonal function. Studying the prosodic realization of wo xiang makes an important contribution to understanding how prosody conveys subtle shades of meaning that are nonetheless crucial for utterance interpretation. Conversational speakers use a variety of prosodic features in different contexts to accomplish their communicative purposes.