Significance as a lens: Understanding the Mandarin ba construction through discourse adjacent alternation

- Lens is speakers' subjective evaluation of reality, especially attitudes toward an event.
- The significance lens marks an event highly consequential, challenging, or important.
- Mandarin ba-construction is a significance marker.
- Discourse adjacent alternation method can reveal functions of grammatical constructions.
- Pragmatic factors in linguistic choice-making during social interaction.

Given alternative grammatical options, how do native speakers make the choice in a given communicative context? Drawing data from 300 videotaped conversations (100 h; one-million words), this study is the first to use a discourse adjacent alternation method to investigate how real-life speakers in a single conversation use alternative grammatical constructions to describe the same event. This study proposes the concept of LENS as a new aspect of linguistic construal. Lens refers to speakers' subjective evaluation of reality, especially their attitudes toward an event. This study finds that SIGNIFICANCE is a lens that evaluates an event as being highly consequential, challenging, or important. The elusive ba-construction in Mandarin is a linguistic device for the construe of significance: The ba-construction prototypically marks a transitive event as a significant consequence, contribution, or action, which is highly consequential, highly challenging, or highly important. The findings raise questions as to what linguistic devices are used in other languages to construe significance and what devices are used to construe other lenses in Mandarin and in other languages. This study reveals an association of linguistic markedness with discourse-level choices among paradigmatic oppositions in social interaction and suggests that syntactic markedness and semantic complexity correlate with discourse significance. The findings shed light on the pragmatic factors in linguistic choice-making during social interaction.