Actually and Qishi

To make a comparison between actually and its corresponding expression, qishi in Mandarin Chinese, a variety of functions of these two expressions in spoken discourse are explored in this study. Aside from research on functions of actually and qishi, however, this study is also devoted to a comparison between researcher's and language users' perspectives on using these two expressions. This study goes through two stages. In stage one, there are respectively 500 tokens of actually and qishi collected from recording of TV shows and DVD movie commentaries. Next, in stage two, there are 18 uses of actually and 174 uses of qishi elicited from the interviews. To compare the perspective of the researcher with that of the language users, the functions of these elicited tokens are respectively examined by the researcher and the interviewees, namely, the language users themselves.