Existing descriptions of the functions of discourse particles, whether linguistic (Erman 1987, Ostman 1981, Schourup 1985), sociolinguistic (Schiffrin 1987, Stubbe and Holmes 1995) or historical (Brinton 1996) in nature, have largely concentrated on the speaker's intentions and internal reasoning behind their use. The present study moves away from an exclusive focus on the speaker and examines instead how intersubjectivity in talk is achieved through the use of discourse particles. It views discourse particles as resources that both the speaker and the hearer draw upon to jointly structure information, interaction, as well as the local activity at hand. It articulates an approach to the study of discourse particles which is sensitive to not only grammatical and sequential contexts in which they are embedded and to which they contribute, but also their non-verbal co-texts. In this sense, it continues and expands the theme of recent interaction-oriented research on discourse particles (Beach 1994 on "okay", Heritage and Sorjonen 1994 on "and", Guthrie 1997 on "uh huh", He and Lindsey 1998 on "you know", among others).

Empirically, the present study offers new insights into the pragmatic functions of a syntactic form in Chinese dui bu dui (literally, ‘correct-not-correct’), when it is used to convey non-propositional meanings. Drawing on naturally occurring data from classroom interactions, we argue that the traditional account of dui bu dui as a tag question is not adequate (Li and Thompson, 1981). Seeking evidence from the discursive purposes of dui bu dui, its sequential positions in interaction, and the nature of the activity it is situated in, we adapted Fraser’s (1990, 1996) framework on pragmatic markers and propose that the functions of dui bu dui is multi-facet and context-sensitive. We show that appearing at the beginning or the end of Turn Construction Unit (TCU, Ford and Thompson 1996), dui bu dui is used as a basic marker to reinforce the illocutionary force of the sentence proposition it is tagged to; whereas at the beginning or as an independent TCU, dui bu dui is used as a discourse marker to signal transitions of interactional sequences at different levels of discourse and to help the speaker maintain the addressee’s attention in given activities.

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