From temporal adverbials to discourse markers: The development of Chinese yuánláiand its Japanese cognate ganrai

This study aims to explore and compare the developmental pathways of Chinese yuánlái ‘originally, previously’ and its Japanese cognate ganrai ‘originally, inherently’ from temporal adverbials to discourse markers (DMs). It seeks to reveal how words originating from the same Chinese source evolve into discourse markers with different functions. The data utilized are drawn from 4 electronic corpora and 1 database, which encompass the complete history of Chinese and Japanese. Chinese yuánlái developed from the temporal noun yuán ‘origin,’ and the suffix lái ‘to come’ was added in the 8th century CE, driven by the disyllabification trend in traditional Chinese. It entered Japanese through written texts in about the same period. Both yuánlái and ganrai embarked with the meaning of ‘originally, from the beginning.’ This study demonstrates that their semantic changes were motivated by the differentiation of pragmatic implicatures, specifically the Q-Principle and the R-Principle proposed by Laurence R. Horn (1984, 2012a, 2012b). Yuánlái followed a trajectory starting from the lexical meaning ‘previously’ with the feature of [+contrast], evolving into mirative, background and justificational markers. On the other hand, DM ganrai originated from the lexical meaning of ‘from the beginning till now, always’ with the feature of [-contrast], later interpreted as “by nature, inherently,” and eventually transformed into an elaborative marker. The findings of this study offer fresh insights into the emergence of discourse markers from shared Chinese etyma through language contact within the Sinosphere. Moreover, it is revealed that constraints of lexical meanings could influence the emergence of potential DM functions.