Recent developments in the use of the plural marker men in Modern Standard Chinese in Taiwan

Abstract

Like any other living language, Mandarin Chinese is continually evolving and being modified in response to both internal and external pressures. These changes have been studied by numerous scholars, who have concentrated mainly on the written language. This paper chooses to explore whether the changes observed, as in the use of the plural marker men, can also be traced in spoken Chinese. For the purposes of studying language change in progress, archived recordings of television broadcasts were used as a source of spoken language samples. This study focuses on the variety of Modern Standard Chinese spoken in Taiwan, as exemplified in a popular Taiwanese variety show over the period 1996 to 2002. The analysis of the data reveals a number of changes in the use of the plural marker men, with some intriguing gender differences and pragmatic nuances.