Evaluative and interactive functions of retrospective epistemic causal markers: A discourse grammar analysis of ‘no wonder’ expressions from a cross-linguistic perspective

Ahn, Mikyung (2026) “Evaluative and interactive functions of retrospective epistemic causal markers: A discourse grammar analysis of ‘no wonder’ expressions from a cross-linguistic perspective“

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This study explores the diachronic development and discourse-pragmatic functions of ‘no wonder’ expressions within the Discourse Grammar framework. It shows that ‘no wonder’ expressions often undergo cooptation — a shift from a nominal predicate embedded in sentence grammar (e.g., it is no wonder that …) to a syntactically and prosodically detached thetical expression (e.g., No wonder). In this freer syntactic form, it functions as an evaluative interactive, enabling speakers to enhance discourse coherence and simultaneously signal their epistemic and socio-interactional stances. Discursively, ‘no wonder’ expressions occur mainly in retrospective epistemic causal relations — i.e., in contexts where speakers reinterpret known outcomes based on new information. Our analysis reveals ‘no wonder’ expressions do not denote objective causation but encode speaker-based inferential reasoning. Spoken data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), demonstrate how English no wonder expressions are used to convey cognitive resolution through evaluation, irony, or affective stance. In this study, we further argue that no wonder is more than a stance marker; it is a flexible metadiscursive resource that negotiates perspective, manages epistemic asymmetry, and shapes affective positioning. This development generally parallels crosslinguistic patterns in various other languages (e.g. German, Norwegian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Malay), where evaluative expressions shift from clause-internal predicates to discourse-level theticals. These findings support the view that cooptation is central to the rise of interactional markers, shedding light on the development of evaluatives from diachronic, pragmatic, and crosslinguistic perspectives. This study offers broader implications for our understanding of how interactional expressions emerge across typologically diverse languages.