Guiding assertions and questions in discourse

Abstract

This paper explores how discourse markers contribute to the update of discourse through a detailed study of Mandarin dique ‘indeed’ and zhende ‘really’. On the basis of empirical data and a naturalness rating experiment, we show that dique and zhende make similar yet different contributions to discourse updates. Dique presupposes that its prejacent issue is old, while zhende presupposes that its prejacent issue is old and that some discourse participant has failed to resolve this issue. Furthermore, dique and zhende can embed both assertions and questions. This supports Farkas and Bruce’s (2010) Table stack model, which provides a uniform treatment for assertions and questions.