Hao in spoken Chinese discourse: relevance and coherence

This study aimed to provide a unified description of the lexeme hao, in which its polyfunctionality is accounted for in terms of an abstract basic meaning that interacts in various ways with the different levels of discourse in which hao can function. The corpus contained two sets of data: naturally occurring daily conversations (totaling 120′55″) and radio interviews and call-ins (120′32″ in total). The daily conversations are less formal and less planned than the radio interviews and call-ins. They were taped via audio cassettes and transcribed into intonation units, i.e., sequences of words combined under a single unified intonation contour, usually preceded by a pause. The theoretical and analytical framework adopted in this study was drawn from the work of M.A.K. Halliday [An Introduction to Functional Grammar, Edward Arnold, London, 1994], a tripartite model consisting of ideational, textual, and interactional levels. Acting as a loose talk marker, hao is mainly used to contribute to the relevance of utterances. Specifically, in addition to functioning as an adjective or a degree adverb at the ideational level, it can be used as a marker of closure or transition at the textual level and as a marker of agreement or concession at the interactional level. Put differently, as a predicative adjective, hao can be used in a declarative sentence to express a speaker's positive attitude towards something, i.e., to indicate that something is “good.” Then it develops into a discourse marker, which construes a world that has no reference in the described situation, but only to the speaker's world of belief about coherence, especially about correlations between situations.