A Contrastive Study Of Modal Particles In Chinese And Vietnamese

In modern Chinese and Vietnamese language, modal particles designed to express a variety of moods have high frequency of practice in actual life. Chinese and Vietnamese modal particles share many characters in common, but there remain many subtle differences. Therefore, modal particles are the teaching keys and difficult points of Chinese as well as Vietnamese as a Foreign Language. However, so far there have not been any achievements in comparison research in this regard. This thesis analyzes the syntatic, semantics, pragmatics of the modal particles in Chinese and Vietnamese, and using the modal particles in Chinese and Vietnamese language as the research object. On the basis of this analysis, a contrastive study of modal particles is made between Chinese language and Vietnamese language. It includes seven chapters:Chapter Ⅰ is the overview, mainly introducing and briefly reviewing the research situation of modal particles in Chinese and Vietnamese, and analyzing the similarities and differences in the explanation, definition and research of "mood" and "modality" in Chinese and Vietnamese language. On that basis, the scope of research on mood and modal particle has been defined for the thesis. Finaly, the author briefly describes the significance of this thesis, the research objectives, theoretical basis and research methods, the corpus source as well as the thesis structure.Chapters Ⅱ carries out a comparison between the positions of modal particles in Chinese and Vietnamese language, pointing out their similarities and differences. This chapter apllies semantics, pragmatics, grammar, and cognitive linguistics theory to explain the causes of the positions of modal particles. It is concluded that modal particles in Chinese and Vietnamese are mainly located at the end of a sentence in order to meet the basic needs of cognitive. Aspects affecting the distribution of modal particles in Chinese and Vietnamese are in common; thus, the distribution of modal particles are alike rather than different. However, in case that modal particles appear together with the second person, it will show discontent in Chinese, while in Vietnamese it is a reflection of courtesy. There may be a pause between modal particles and aclausein Vietnamese language; meanwhile, there is no such thing in Chinese language. To some extent, this shows the relative independence of Vietnamese modal particles and the more imaginary tone words used in Vietnamese.Chapters III and IV use modal particles at the end of interrogative sentencs, declarative sentences, imperative sentences, and exclamatory sentence as a framework, analyzing the meaning of end-of-sentence modal particles in both languages and making a comparison between the similarities of the two languages. These two chapters analyzes the mood meaning of modal particles appearing at the end of the four above kinds of sentences, doing research on equivalent and nonequivalent cases as well as displaying the specific characters of mood expression of modal particles in Chinese and Vietnamese languages. For example, to show emotion, Vietnamese language often bases on modal particles, while Chinese language uses intonation and other methods. Among modal particles used at the end of interrogative sentence, Chinese only has "ma" which means the interrogative mood, Vietnamese has " ha "a (a)","nhe","nhi" which means the interrogative mood, while many other end-of-sentence modal particles do not express the interrogative mood but show a variety of feelings attitude, and add a variety of mood for interrogative sentence. Modal particles at the end of statement sentences express a variety of mood, but the types of mood in Vietnamese are more various than that in Chinese. Some modal particles in Chinese and Vietnamese expresses the same mood type, but they are different in pragmatic or usage. Modal particles used the end of the imperative sentence add a warm mood to the whole sentence; in Chinese "ba" is the only word that expresses the imperative mood, while in Vietnamese " di","nao","voi" all can express the imperative mood.Chapter V carries out a survey on the phenominon of co-existence of Chinese and Vietnamese modal particles, and a comparative analysis is made on this basis. Their similarities mainly include:(a) the strict order of words in combination which permits no mixture between them;(b) the level in the combination of modal particles in both Chinese and Vietnamese languages;(c) the mood of meaning expressed in conjunction with Convergence trend. The differences include:(a) Vietnamese modal particles are complex and diverse; two, three or even four modal particles are used in conjunction, while only a maximum of three modal particles used in conjunction in Chinese, and the conjunction of two variants are generally due to the chorus of the phenomenon of the last Chinese one modal particle appear;(b) there may be a pause between conjunctions in Vietnamese, and there may even be words of the second person; however, all these are impossible in Chinese;(c) in regards to semantic aspects, Chinese and Vietnamese modal particles are restricted by the same semantic factors limit but there still remain some differences between them.Chapter Ⅵ mainly researches on the expressive function, verbal function, courtesy function and sentence completion function of end-of sentence modal particles in Chinese and Vietnamese languages, and then on that basis, a comparison is made between the two languages. This chapter also looks at the signaling function, Fax suspected function, Reference function, courtesy function, the pause function and information functions of Chinese and Vietnamese end-of-sentence modal particles, pointing out both similarities and differences between the two languages. In addition, this part of the thesis also analyzes specific funtion of modal particles in each language, including a link function of the Vietnamese and finished the sentence completion function of Chinese.Chapter Ⅶ is the conclusion which summarizes the research work and the main conclusions as well as showing the inovations, the strength and weakness of this thesis, and the problems to be solved.