Dialogicity in dialogue: Deriving Chinese discourse marker bieshuo from the negative imperative

•Chinese discourse marker bieshuo originated as a negative imperative.•It underwent grammaticalization motivated by structure-viewpoint interaction.•All stages of this grammaticalization still exist and the marker is still evolving.•This paper on bieshuo's evolution expands our knowledge of discourse marker origins.•This further accounts for semantic and syntactic change patterns.

This paper focuses on the crucial role of the interaction of linguistic structure and viewpoints in language use for the emergence of the Chinese discourse marker bieshuo. Corpus evidence suggests that the discourse marker bieshuo originated as a negative imperative in dialogue, and then developed through a series of stages of grammaticalization, in each of which it gained a new discourse function or functions. Current data further indicate that all these stages continue to coexist and that the marker is still undergoing development. This paper's exploration of the novel evolution of bieshuo expands the catalogue of historical origins of discourse markers, necessary not just for a full account of semantic change patterns across languages but also for studies on external motivation of syntactic change.