Wakefield, John C. (2011). Disentangling the meanings of two Cantonese evidential particles. Chinese Language & Discourse, 2(2), 250-293.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/cld.2.2.05wak
Abstract:
Some linguists have argued that sentence-final particles (SFPs) are only meaningful in relation to discourse content. Adopting as a working hypothesis the idea that SFPs have core meanings independent of the discourse context, this paper proposes definitions for two evidential SFPs in Cantonese with related meanings: 咯 lo1 and 吖吗 aa1maa3.
Corpus-based examples and constructed minimal-pair dialogues are used to demonstrate that the definitions succeed at accounting for all the contexts that allow one, the other, both, or neither of the SFPs to be used based on acceptability judgments from native speakers of Cantonese. In addition to furthering our understanding of the two SFPs under discussion, this paper provides empirical evidence in support of the idea that discourse particles have context-independent meanings.
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
