The word “really”, expressed forcefully, was the crux of a long-running comedy routine more than a decade ago, on the American TV program Saturday Night Live. A recent study takes a really good look at the equivalent word in the Mandarin Chinese language. The study is:
“Stance-taking and (inter)subjective roles of Mandarin zhende (ma/a),” Shuang He, Ling Zhou, and Shaojie Zhang, Lingua, vol. 323, August 2025, article 103951. The authors explain:
This study explores the non-interrogative functions of the newsmark zhende (ma/a) (‘really’) in Mandarin conversation interaction, focusing on its stance-taking and (inter)subjective roles in systematically context-sensitive ways.
Here is video of one of those Saturday Night Live comedy routines:
