ABSTRACT
The first book I read about discourse analysis was Deborah Schiffrin’s (1987) Discourse Markers. Back in the 1980s, Chomsky’s GB theory was mainstream in linguistic research, and luckily for me, Professor Shuanfan Huang, my MA thesis supervisor, was one of those who did not jump on the bandwagon. It took someone as wise as him to see the connection between Schiffrin’s work on discourse markers and the Chinese sentence-final particles which had used to be thought of as trivial phatic elements. It took me two years to complete my dissertation entitled A discourse-functional analysis of Mandarin sentence-final particles at National Chengchi University, Taiwan in 1991, which is still kept at the library of Cambridge University at the time of writing (my English name was Chi-Chiang Shie in 1991). The story moved on to 1996 when I enrolled in the then Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics of Cambridge University as an MPhil student where Professor Gillian Brown was the director. Brown and Yule (1983) was another classic core reading for students doing discourse analysis in the late 1980s. Professor Brown saw my MA thesis upon presentation and must have liked it so it found its way into the Cambridge library.
