This article first explores the epistemic adjustment function of social action format‘xiang(像)+NP’in Chinese daily conversation from the perspective of positionally sensitive grammar,then describes the sequential position of‘xiang+NP’.An examination of the data reveals that‘xiang’,originally a common verb,has evolved a variety of emerging usages such as preposition and topic marker,each usage corresponding to a different discourse pattern.It is found that‘xiang+NP’has fine-grained interactional functions of narrowing epistemic gap,cont...
