Mandarin Chinese buguo (‘but’) as a metacoherence marker in TV/radio interview talks

Abstract

Abstract This study examines the uses of Mandarin Chinese buguo ‘but’ as a contrastive discourse marker (CM) in spoken discourse. The data were taken from casual conversations, TV/radio single-interviewee interviews and TV panel news interviews. We found that two main types of the CM buguo were used to mark contrast: restrictive buguo and cancellative buguo. Restrictive buguo is similar to the adv buguo in usage in that it modifies the validity of the preceding proposition to signal implicit contrast. Cancellative buguo is used to cancel the validity of a previous proposition to indicate explicit contrast. As such, restrictive buguo can serve as a topic-shift marker and to convey implicit disagreement; cancellative buguo often acts as a topic-change marker used to introduce explicit disagreement. In particular, both restrictive buguo and cancellative buguo can serve as metacoherence markers, which are often employed by interview hosts/hostesses to make the discourse optimally coherent.