A Study Of Meanings And Functions Of The Chinese Modal Particle “a”

The study of mood in Chinese has a long history and has made great progress in the past.However,due to the uniqueness and complexity of Chinese mood system,there is still a lack of a consensus on some basic issues among the Chinese scholars to this day.The study of modal particle a(?)is a case in point.The literature shows that researchers have not reached an agreement on the particle's core grammatical meaning,about which there are various descriptions.These descriptions are particularly hard to catch and pose great challenge for further abstraction and conceputalization.This arises a greater sense of urgency and a stronger need of revisit to this particle considering the fact that it is the most frequently and flexibly used modal particle in modern Chinese.In view of the fact that past studies have been greatly constrained by the lack of a sound theoretical basis or theoretical perspective,and by the traditional research methods of “interpretating modal particles in sentences”,this study is intended to revisit a to reconceptualize its core grammatic meaning and reexamine its pragmatic meanings and functions from a grammar-pragmatics interaction perspective,by analyzing a large number of instances of a.It draws on the latest research results of the relations among among grammar,semantics and pragmatics and adopts the code-inference model proposed by Ariel(2008,2010)in particular as its general framework of meaning interpretation of a.Specifically,this study is intended to explore meanings and functions of a by answering the following three questions:(1)In which syntactic slots is the modal particle a put to use in different types of sentences in modern Chinese? What syntactic and semantic features do sentences with a display?(2)What is the core grammatical meaning of the modal particle a in modern Chinese?(3)What pragmatic meanings does the modal particle a express in different contexts?This study adopted both qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze up to 5234 cases of a retrieved from a modern Chinese corpus step by step.First,it analyzed in detail the syntactic slots of a in all these cases and clearly marked them;second,it counted the sum of a in each syntactic slot and added them up;third,it examined the meaning and function of a in each syntactic slot;fourth,it ascertained the core grammatic meaning to which the meanings and functions of a in all instances point,and the pragmatic meanings a conveys in different contexts.Through both qualitative and quantitative analysis,it found that:(1)In modern Chinese,the modal particle a can be used in all the four types of sentences,from the most to the least occurrences are exclamatives,declaratives,interrogatives,and imperatives respectively.While a's syntactic slots are restrained to the sentence-final position and the position immediately after addressing terms in both imperatives and interrogatives,its slots vary in exclamatives and declaratives,from the sentence-final position,to sentence-medial positions,both near and far away from the predictives,and to the sentence-initial position.In addition,these declaratives,exclamatives and imperatives with a attached to the sentence-final position display some prominent syntactic and semantic features.Syntactically,around half of these declaratives and exclamatives are typical definitive sentences;more than thirty percent of these exclamatives use intensifiers to modify adverbs/adjectives to strengthen certain features and to highlight the numbers of related entities;these imperatives mainly contain structures like “single phoneme verbs/simple verbs+a”,“modal verbs/adverbs(like yao,dei,yi ding,bie,bu xu,bu neng,bu yao)+verbs/verb phrases+a”.Semantically,while the declaratives and exclamatives mainly express speaker's judgements,evaluations or opinions about related entities,the imperatives are used to exclaim for help in case of emergency,to command,to remind,to demand or to prohibit the addressee to do something out of very strong wishes or emotions.(2)In modern Chinese,a is a typical modal marker,encoding thus expressing the speaker's affirmative attitude towards her own opinions or comments of her utterances,or the propositional content of her utterances.In essence,the modal marker a is used to enhance her own(abstract)attitudes of viewing her utterances as assertion,exclamation,optative and inquiry,so as to strengthen the forces of her utterances.Through strenghthening the forces of the utterances,drawing on the contents of her utterances,and related contextual information such as the speaker's knowledge,beliefs and mental states,the modal marker a helps convey and highlight the speaker's emotions towards some relevant objects.The speaker's emotions are indirectly conveyed as pragmatic meanings in specific contexts.Data analysis reveals that,the use of the modal particle a in modern Chinese involves both grammatical and pragmatic aspects: it involves both decoding a's grammatic meaning and inference to the speaker's emotions on the basis of her utterances and related contexts.(3)In modern Chinese,the modal particle a expresses different meanings or fullfills different functions when used in different types of sentences,and in their different slots.In addition to its core meaning and the speaker's emotions,a also expresses meanings or fullfils functions in line with the speaker's intention to organize conversations and discourse information in specific ways,and to forground and intensify speaker's emotions: in sentence-medial positions of declarative sentences,a mainly expresses “pause”,and meanwhile it marks the topic or theme of a sentence,discourse continuity,exemplification and enumeration.It has gradually evolved into a functional(discourse)marker.In sentence-initial positions of declarative sentences,a is used to express agreement or affirmation,to initiate a conversation,and/or to take over the turn.It has gradually evolved into an interactional(discourse)marker.In sentence-initial and-medial positions of exclamatives,a is used to foreground and strengthen the speaker's emotions.It has evolved into an exclamatory marker.Moreover,when the speaker uses a in her utterances,the prosodic characteristics and the way of speaking out can also reveal certain emotions and feelings on the part of the speaker,which is,for the most part,a reflection of the paralinguistic features of her utterances.Based on the above findings,this study drew the following conclusions: In modern Chinese,the use of the modal particle a is highly conventionalized,its meanings and functions are results of interactions between a's core grammatic meaning and related contextual factors.Its different uses reveal frequent interactions between grammar and pragmatics,which can be captured as a choice-making process and an accommdation process respectively: on the one hand,the speaker,out of her communicative needs,chooses a(instead of ba,ya or some other modal particles)from the resource system of mood and modality in Chinese to express certain modal meaning,mainly a sort of reinforcement of her affirmative attitude towards her utterances or the propositional content of her utterances;on the other hand,its core grammatic meaning will adjust accordingly when put into specific uses,to accommodate the speaker's intention to organize the conversation structure,the discourse information in a certain way,and to highlight the speaker's emotions,thus enabling a to assume different pragmatic meanings and pragmatic functions.This study grounded its conclusions on the results of an intensive and comprehensive examination of a large data,and adopted a new theoretic perspective of the interaction between grammar and pragmatics in its analysis in order to seek for a new approach and method to explain the uses of the modal particle a.Compared with extensive descriptions that feature in traditional studies of modal particles in modern Chinese,it is a bold attempt indeed,with a certain degree of simplification,abstraction and generalization,to help us see the very nature of a through a “jungle” of utterances with a,and achieve a better understanding of the interaction of grammar and pragmatics.Therefore,this study is of some theoretical significance.