Leung, Helen Hue Lam (2013). The Cantonese utterance particle ‘gaa3’ and particle combinations: An NSM semantic analysis. In John Henderson, Marie-Eve Ritz, & Celeste Rodríguez Louro (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2012 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society (27 pp.). https://sites.google.com/site/als2012uwa/proceedings. PDF (open access)
Cantonese utterance particles occur in ordinary Cantonese conversation every one or two seconds. Speech becomes unnatural when they are omitted. They are often used in combinations of more than one, with ‘basic’ and ‘compound’ particles totalling approximately one hundred. However, it is generally agreed that the particles’ meanings are extremely elusive. This study uses the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) framework and natural speech data from the Hong Kong Cantonese Corpus to explain the meaning of the utterance particle gaa3 as used in statements. Gaa3 is the second most frequently used utterance particle in the corpus, and the eleventh most frequently used Cantonese word
overall. The NSM explication proposed clearly states what the ‘core’ or invariant meaning of gaa3 is. Furthermore, the explications of gaa3 and two other particles, laa1 and wo3, can reveal why they can
(or cannot) combine, and what their composite meanings are. This is a new approach to the untested idea that the meaning of particle ‘clusters’ is equal to that of the individual particles combined. The explications begin to expose a system with which the vast array and patterns of Cantonese utterance particles can be explained in a logical way.
