Study On The Modal Particle Of Foreign Mandarin Materials In The 19th Century

It is generally believed that modern Chinese mandarin is based on the Beijing dialect,but in recent years many scholars found that the basic dialects of mandarin in the mid-19th century were transferred from southern dialects to northern dialects,and there were a lot of words of southern mandarin in the official language system at that time.The transferred mandarin system depicts the original landscape of the modern Mandarin system.Based on this,former scholars have carried out a lot of fruitful research,and gradually painted a clearer picture of modern mandarin,which gives us a great inspiration.The excavation of foreign official documents in the 19th century provided more possibilities for the study of modern Chinese mandarin,which not only faithfully recorded the usage of language at that time,but also recorded the pronunciation.Compared with the domestic "silent" literature,the foreign literature has incomparable advantage.This paper intends to take foreign literature as the research material and the modal particle as the research object.While sorting out relevant literature of the 19th century mandarin and comparing with the research results based on domestic materials,it tries to outline the general picture of the modal particle from both inside and outside.It takes a special focus on some of the peculiar modal particles and extend efforts to explore its origin and development path,thus furthering the understanding of the development and evolution of the modal particles in modern Chinese language.The modal particle is an important modal category in Chinese,and the relationship with sound is very close.The 19th century witnesses rapid development of the modal particle system,which has both inherited and developed the previous modal particles and produced new ones.Using the 19th century foreign mandarin materials to study the modal particles can make use of the pronunciation and the words in historical context to sort out the initial appearance of the early general modal particles system with Beijing pronunciation as the standard tone.In addition,it can find examples of southern modal particles stranded in mandarin due to the transfer of the basic dialect.Based on language facts,this paper uses a multi-angle comparison method to discuss the modal particles appearing in the 19th century foreign mandarin materials from the pronunciation,shape of character and functions.On the basis of description,it combined with the phonetic examination of the words in this period and verified and reflected the existing modal particle theories,such as Phonetic Combination and Phonetic Weakening.This article consists of seven sections:Chapter 1 introduces the research object,scope,current research status,significance,route and methods,and corpus.This paper clearly divides the survey data into three categories:southern language materials,mandarin materials and Beijing language materials.Since the object is foreign materials,in order to exclude the differences in language acquisition of non-native speakers,this paper also selects the domestic materials of the same period to make a comparison so as to encure the correctness of the corpus and materials used.Chapter 2 introduces the foreigners’ view of Chinese modal particles,and initially establishes the mandarin modal particles system in foreign materials,the southern language materials and the Beijing dialect materials.Based on the pronunciation and character shape,the modal particles of this period can be divided into four categories:The first category is the modal particles of the same origin but somehow changed written form due to the change of pronunciation,such as"mo"(麽)" and "ma"(吗),"a"(啊)and "he"(呵/吓),and so on.The second category is the ones whose tone of the pronunciation begins to change and whose sound and shape are mismatched,such as"liao"(了).The third category is modal particles that are inconsistent with the pronunciation of modern Chinese,such as "ni"(呢)and so on.The fourth category is the polymorphism caused by historical reasons,such as "zhe(着)" and "zhuo(着)","mo(麽/么)" and "ba(罢/吧)" and so on.Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 divide the modal particles according to its syntactic position.The paper describes the modal particles in the official materials of this period from the functions of statement,doubt,prayer,sigh and master mark,quasi-master mark and non-master mark and sketched out the use of the words in the modal particles at the time.In this paper,the modal particles that occur at the end of the sentence are divided into single-word and multiple words.Single words are subdivided into single-syllable single use and multi-syllable single use according to syllables.It compares with the north-south(foreign,domestic)materials of the same period on the basis of describing the function of each modal particles,finds the special modal particles in the mandarin materials,at the same time we record the modal particles that are not included in the mandarin materials but used in the domestic materials in the annex.The fifth chapter studies the special "lo(咯)" class words and "la(喇)" class words in the mandarin system with the former as the focus of investigation.Through the comparison of the usage of "lo(咯)" in mandarin materials and the Cantonese materials,we think that "lo" is the modal particles transferred from the southern dialect into the mandarin system.It originated from Cantonese."Lo(咯)" has lost its "K" sound as it travels northwards.After combining with "luo","lo" got more powerful and became a common word in mandarin in th 19th century.Then it was squeezed out by "了",a modal particles of the same function.The modal particles "la" in mandarin is influenced by the Cantonese;its actual function combines that of "la" in the Southern dialect and "la" in the Beijing dialect.The reason for this difference because the westerners’ earliest counter with the Chinese language is actually Cantonese.Chapter 6 makes a comprehensive analysis of the modal particle system of the 19th century mandarin literature.By using frequency and the popularity of literature to find the recognition of modal particles in each sentence class,and by comparing with the north and south materials of the same period,the level of influence of each mood word in the official literature is found according to similarity.Finally,the characteristics of the modal particle system in late 19th century are summarized.Chapter 7 summarizes the main conclusions and innovations of the whole text,and points out the shortcomings of the article and the direction of future efforts.