Speaker-orientation meaning and positional shifts of discourse structuring markers

Discourse structuring markers, and, more generally, discourse markers, are known to be sensitive to their positions, often favoring the clause-initial position. On a diachronic dimension, some discourse structuring markers emerge at the clause-initial position and move to occur the clause-medial position at a later stage of their development, whereas some do not exhibit such positional shifts. The factors that enable such positional shifts have not yet been identified, and this study intends to fill the gap. This study collected discourse structuring markers attested in Chinese historical data from various sources and traced their developmental paths, focusing on their occurrence positions. Two groups of markers, i.e., the shènzhì (甚至) ‘even’ group and the bùguò (不过) ‘however, but’ group, exhibited a marked contrast in terms of their meanings and developmental patterns. An analysis led to the conclusion that the shift from the clause-initial to clause-medial positions is correlated with the presence of the speaker-oriented meanings; those with the speaker-oriented meanings (the shènzhì -group) shifted their positions, whereas those without such meanings (the bùguò- group) did not. This hypothesized correlation between the speaker-oriented meaning and the positional shift was examined with discourse structuring markers in English, which supported our hypothesis. Further research is needed to ascertain the crosslinguistic validity of the hypothesis, but at the current level of analysis, there is a strong indication that the presence or absence of the speaker-oriented meanings in the discourse structuring markers is the semantic determinant of their positional shift.