ELSEVJER Journal of Pragmatics 33 (2001) 1441-1465 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma zyxwvutsrq Dui bu dui as a pragmatic marker: Evidence from Chinese classroom discourse* Yiya Chen, Agnes Weiyun He Linguistics Department, State University of New York at Stony Brook, NY 11794-4376, USA Received 14 October 1998; revised version 11 December 2000 zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZ Abstract Seeking evidence from its discursive purposes, its sequential positions in interaction, and the nature of the activity it is situated in, we reexamine the form dui bu dui ‘correct-not-cor- rect’ that was used during four class meetings, a total of six hours, in a Chinese language school. We propose that besides functioning as an A-not-A question, dui bu dui can also be used for pragmatic purposes. We show that appearing at the beginning or the end of TCU, dui bu dui is used as a basic marker to reinforce the illocutionary force of the sentence proposi- tion it is tagged to; whereas at the beginning or as an independent TCU, dui bu dui is used as a discourse marker to signal transitions of interactional sequences at different levels of dis- course and to help the speaker maintain the addressee’s attention in given activities. Such an approach to analyze the functions of dui bu dui suggests that (a) grammatical meanings in part emerge from interactional contexts, within which speakers construct, validate, or modify each other’s meanings on a moment-by-moment basis; and (b) functions of specific language forms can also be assigned by the specific activities the speakers are engaged in. 0 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Discourse marker; Tag question; Chinese; Dui-bu-dui; Classroom discourse; Conversation analysis * We would like to thank the anonymous referees for their helpful comments. Different parts of this paper have been presented at The IPh North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics at Harvard University and the American Association of Applied Linguistics Conference in Stamford, Connecticut. In addition, we thank Mark Aronoff and Richard Gerrig for their insightful questions and suggestions. Thanks also go to Meghan Sumner, Elyse Tamberino, and Yan Zhang for the discussions during the QPW meetings, and Naoko Takahashi for help during the initial stage of the research. Agnes Weiyun He would like to acknowledge a research grant from the Spencer Foundation which partly supported the writing of this paper. Any deficiencies are, of course, our own. 0378-2166/01/$ - see front matter 0 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: SO378-2166(00)00084-9