The Study of Semantic Prosody of Chinese Logical Resultative Formulae: A Corpus-assisted Discourse Analysis Approach

Abstract

Logical resultative formulae refer to the
formularized expressions denoting causal/resultative relations
between two situations or events. In Chinese such expressions as
yinwei… suoyi (因为/because…所以/so), yuanyinshi (原因是/The
reason is…)， jinran…jiu(既然/ since…就/then), etc. are widely
used cases. These expressions frequently serve as the bridge
linking two clauses; yet in communication they do not just fulfill
conjunction functions, instead they convey the addresser’s
attitudinal meaning, namely semantic prosody. However, up to
now, no research has been done concerning semantic prosodies of
Chinese logical resultative formulae. Thus, with the help of
corpus-assisted discourse analysis approach, the present article
attempts to do a research on semantic prosodies of Chinese logical
resultative formulae so that we can avoid misusing these
expressions while expressing cause and effect relations in Chinese.