Subjectivity In Language And Ma-questions

Modal particles are very important in Chinese grammar, but they always make difficulties for research work and learning of Chinese as a second language due to their uncertain meanings.This paper is devoted to analyze the typical interrogative particle Ma especially the concrete meanings of Ma-questions. According to some views in the theory of subjectivity and through the corpus study of 1060 examples, we described the subjective semantic patterns of different Ma-questions in context, and reached the conclusion that Ma-questions in context can embody ten kinds of speakers' subjective feelings and attitudes at least. We also disclosed that, the subjective semantic of all Ma-questions is a continuum from low to high subjectivity, and there are more Ma-questions with high subjectivity in practical use.