Mood Particles "Zai", "Le" And "Lai" Of Lu'an Urban Dialect

This is a thesis on mood particles "zai", "le" and "lai"of Lu'an urban dialect. All of them can be taken as combined markers of tense, aspect and mood, and this phenomenon is not common in Mandarin.In this thesis, firstly we summarize most of the existing related research on this topic in recent years. Secondly in the main part of the paper, we have a full description of mood particles "zai", "le" and "lai", investigate the distributions in different patterns, structures and types of sentences, and the collocation of some grammatical elements. At the same time, we analyze the three mood articles with the combination of form and meaning. After our discussion and analysis one by one, we draw the following conclusions:The words "zai", "le", "lai" which are located in the end of sentences in Lu'an urban dialect are all combined markers of tense, aspect and mood. Specifically, "zai" is a marker of nonprogressive continuous aspect, present tense(absolute or relative present tense) and express a kind of emphasizing mood. "Le" is a marker of perfective aspect, absolute past tense and conveys a kind of confirmation mood, which is similar to "le2" in Mandarin. "Lai" is a marker of perfective aspect, absolute past tense and conveys interrogative mood in "ke-VP" pattern sentences, while it can express a kind of information, rectification and soothing mood in non-"ke-VP" pattern sentences.Finally, we make a comparison of the three mood particles "zai", "le" and "lai" to find out their difference and links,which can help us to understand the three mood particles more clearly, research the phenomenon of "aspect" in Mandarin or Chinese dialects with a more open view and get better understanding of linguistics and its discipline.