A constructional account of the development of the Chinese stance discourse marker běnlái

Abstract This paper examines the emergence of the Chinese adverb běnlái and its further development into a stance discourse marker ( sdm ). Most previous studies consider the epistemic modal adverb běnlái (‘indeed, truly’) to have originated from the temporal adverb běnlái (‘originally’). Based on the framework of constructionalisation ( Traugott and Trousdale 2013 ) and Van de Velde et al.’s (2013) idea of multiple sources, I argue that the temporal adverb might not have been the only source for the modal běnlái to occur. Furthermore, the modal adverb changed into an sdm , thereby signaling the speaker’s subjective evaluation while linking the coherence of the discourse. I argue that the change was enabled by both subjectification and analogisation. The exemplars to which běnlái was by hypothesis analogised include the extant discourse connectives (e.g., kěshì ) and the extant commentary pragmatic markers (e.g., kělián and suǒxìng ) ( Fraser 2009 ).