On Utterance-final Particles In Minnan Local Mandarin—A Pragmatic Perspective

Chinese government has vigorously promoted the use of Standard Mandarin since new China was founded due to the fact that China is a huge country where dozens of dialects are spoken.Standard Mandarin frequently contacts with the dialects in the promotion process and gradually develops into a kind of featured Mandarin called Local Mandarin.MinNan Dialect is widely used in the south region of Fujian Province(MinNan region),which mainly includes:Xiamen,Zhangzhou and Quanzhou.Standard Mandarin and MinNan dialect are in close contact with each other in MinNan region,developing into an unique MinNan Local Mandarin.Recently,Local Mandarins have gained increasing focuses,so does MinNan Local Mandarin.However,most linguists focus on the study of phonetic and lexical features,and less on its grammatical features,especially the use of utterance-final particles.Therefore,this paper mainly focuses on the utterance-final particles of MinNan Local Mandarin,investigating their core pragmatic functions,and the influence of MinNan Dialect on them,and how some utterance-final particles are borrowed from MinNan Dialect.It is hoped that this paper could systematically describe and study these utterance-final particles.A theoretical framework for this study is established on Grice's(1975)Cooperative principle,Leech's(1983)Politeness principle,Brown&Levinson's(1987)Face-threatening acts,Sperber and Wilson's(1986)Relevance principle and the discourse approach.Based on this theoretical framework,five utterance-final particles,including la(?),leh(?),honnh,hannh,and hennh,are examined with the data collected from natural conversations in MinNan regions.Through their features of discourse markers,we study the core pragmatic functions of these utterance-final particles under different contexts,and how hearers infer the conversational implicatures of the utterances in different contexts.With the data analysis,we have reached several findings:la is not simply a phonetic combination of le(?)and a(?)but a marker of completion of a speech unit influenced by MinNan Dialect.Its development in MinNan Local Mandarin is a gradual and continuous process,and the successive use of le and la shows the sign of freezing into a disyllabic utterance-final particle.Leh is a marker of contrastive relation between the expectation of the speaker and the hearer.When two people who both can speak MinNan Dialect communicate with each other in MinNan Local Mandarin,the use of leh strengthens their common identity and solidarity;however,the choice of using these two utterance-final particles is sometimes a kind of unconscious language habit.Utterance-final particles,namely honnh,hannh,and hennh,which are borrowed from MinNan dialect,bear some differences in communicative functions.Among them,honnh has the function of inviting the hearer to negotiate,by using it,the speaker try to save his/her positive and/or negative faces.In addition,when honnh appears in reportings or long monologues,it can also be used as a filler or disfluency marker to fill the pause for thoughts or disfluency.Hannh is a marker of requesting for response,and has a similar use as the utterance-final particle a in Standard Mandarin,but in Standard Mandarin a does not possess the function of requesting for response.And finally hennh is a marker of requesting for confirmation.The study also found that the frequencies of using these three utterance-final particles will be affected by gender,age and educational background of the speaker.We hope this study can bring the importance of MinNan Local Mandarin to the attention and will provide great insight for the research on the utterance-final particles in other Local Mandarins.