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A Study on Discourse Coherence and Tone Transmission in the Discourse Markers "X-lai" — Taking "shuōlái, kànlái, xiǎnglái" as Examples

Meng Zhang
Vol. 6, No. 10, pp. 182-186, 2026 DOI: 10.54691/tcgmhk47 October 19, 2026
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Abstract.This study focuses on three typical discourse markers in modern Chinese—"shuōlái", "kànlái", and "xiǎnglái"—systematically revealing their discourse cohesion mechanisms and mood transmission functions through a combination of corpus analysis and pragmatics theory. Findings indicate that these markers achieve discourse coherence through frame presupposition, topic shift, and stance expression, while simultaneously fulfilling modal functions such as objective statement, subjective conjecture, and reflective evaluation. This research not only enriches the multidimensional analytical framework for Chinese discourse markers but also provides linguistic feature references for discourse analysis in natural language processing.
Keywords. Discourse markers, discourse coherence, modal transmission, presupposition mechanism, stance expression.
APA Citation Meng Zhang (2026). A Study on Discourse Coherence and Tone Transmission in the Discourse Markers "X-lai" — Taking "shuōlái, kànlái, xiǎnglái" as Examples. Frontiers in Humanities and Social Sciences, 6(10), 182-186. https://doi.org/10.54691/tcgmhk47

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