Grammaticalization of Shuo and Jiang in Singapore Mandarin Chinese : a spoken-corpus-based study

This study investigates the extended grammatical uses of the speech act verbs 说 shuo ‘say’ and 讲 jiang ‘say’ in Singapore Mandarin Chinese (SMC). With data from a contemporary spoken corpus, this study finds that while both 说 and 讲 are the major speech act verbs in SMC, 说 has been more grammatically extended than 讲not only in SMC, but also its counterparts in other Mandarin varieties and Chinese dialects. This study argues that the extension has been motivated by both language-external and language-internal factors. The findings of this study will not only contribute to the typology of speech act verbs and their grammaticalization in general, but also the study of language variations and changes.MOE (Min. of Education, S’pore)Accepted versio