The Grammaticalization of Stance Markers in Chinese

Every utterance we make signals our stance – toward someone, something, someplace, some event or situation or some idea. Essentially, our stance is the expression of our beliefs, perspectives, evaluations, and attitudes and can be expressed explicitly (e.g. I don’t like this) or implicitly (e.g. I guess this will do). It can be detected, not only at the clausal level as just shown, but also at the lexical (e.g. awful) and phrasal (e.g. not quite what I expect) levels as well (Xing, 2006). Naturally, for a more comprehensive assessment of a speaker’s stance, we will need to evaluate numerous utterances – sometimes on multiple occasions, and in various contexts, and on a broader scale at the discourse level as well. The focus of this chapter is on stance markers that have emerged as a result of frequent and conventionalized usage, often involving pragmatic implicature. Among the stance markers to be discussed in this chapter are epistemic, evidential and attitudinal markers. We will focus on three major pathways for the emergence of these stance markers in Chinese, namely, the verbal, nominal and indexical pathways.