The Meanings And Co-occurrence Of The Sentence-final Modal Particles In Laiguo Zhuang

Sentence-final modal particles are an important mean to express mood in Zhuang.It is the key and difficult point for grammar research of Zhuang as well.In recent years,Zhuang modal particles have drawn much attention,and a number of publications have thus appeared.These publications focused on the classification,meanings and functions,grammaticalization,contrast of Zhuang and Han or other minority languages,as well as monographic studies of the specific modal particle,while little attention is paid to their mood meanings and co-occurrence order,which will be mainly discussed in this thesis.Besides,since Zhuang is rich in dialects and varieties,more extensive and further studies are still needed before sound generalizations can be provided.Therefore,taking as the study subject Laiguo Zhuang in Laiguo Village Committee,Liangtang Township,Xingbin District of Laibin City in Guangxi,with first-hand data collected in my own fieldwork,the present thesis attempts to provide an in-depth description and analysis of the sentence-final modal particles in Laiguo Zhuang,focusing on the classification of mood meanings(functions)as well as the co-occurrence order of these modal particles,so as to deepen our understanding on Zhuang modal particles and provide some case data on mood and modality study.The modal particles in Laiguo Zhuang display various meanings and functions.Major research findings are as follow:1)Functions of the sentence-final modal particles in Laiguo Zhuang include mood meanings(declarative,imperative,interrogative and exclamatory)and modality meanings(emphasis,affirmative,request,reminding,suggestion,conjecture,inquiry and appreciative,etc.),and the latter can be classified into four categories of the former.2)Based on mood meanings(functions),the sentence-final modal particles can be divided into four types:declarative sentence modal particles,imperative sentence modal particles,interrogative sentence modal particles and exclamatory sentence modal particles.3)The co-occurrence order of sentence-final modal particles is constricted on the basis of modality categories by three affecting factors:semantic integration,semantic scope and subjective degree.Although this paper is only a case study,undoubtedly it is conducive to deepening our understanding of features and rules of Zhuang modal particles,and to building a fundamental understanding of the grammatical system of Laiguo Zhuang.