Too Good to Be True: A Case Study of "Zui Hao Shi"

This paper aims to investigate the polysemy and multifunctionality of the expression “最好是”. It has been observed in recent years that “最好是” has two different meanings and semantic-pragmatic functions. The first function is to express speaker’s suggestion or expectation to the hearers to reach the optimal outcome. It is noted as the deontic optative meaning by Bybee (Bybee et al. 1994). As this meaning expresses expectation to the events in a hypothetical world, the deontic “最好是” also functions as a conditional marker (Traugott 1983). The other meaning of "最好是" is the epistemic meaning. The epistemic meaning of "最好是" performs the indirect speech act to show the speakers' denial or disbelief brought forth by the interlocutor. The paper is to argue that the epistemic meaning of “最好是” derives from the deontic meaning. This semantic change is motivated by subjectification of the semantic implication of deontic meaning, which consists of implicature of “not yet done” and “too good to be true”. The data for this paper consists of three main sources: on-line corpus (Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus), Internet (google and yahoo), and conversation data. The three databases consists of different types of discourse (written and spoken) and different levels of formality. The observation from the data shows that the process of semantic change of "最好是" follows the path of semantic change proposed by Traugott and Dasher (2002). The epistemic meaning of " 最好是" derives from the deontic meaning as the result of subjectification of the semantic implications (Traugott 1999). The distribution of data also points out that the epistemic “最好 是" is informal and requires an interactional context while the deontic “最好是" appear much more frequently in formal context and written discourse. At last, according to the data, it is proposed that the epistemic “最好是" should be established as an epistemic formula. This formulaic form of “最好是” functions as verbal irony. It serves as an option for politeness strategy (Brown and Levinson 1987) to soften and counter direct criticism, complaints, and disbelief.