| Standard Cantonese has a particularly rich inventory of final particles. Final particles are bound morphemes situated at clause or sentence final position. They are traditionally regarded as obligatory elements in utterances and their use in speech makes an utterance sound more lively and vivid. It is difficult to describe their meaning precisely since they usually exhibit a bewildering array of senses of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic uses. Furthermore, standard Cantonese has a large number of phonologically similar particles with related meanings. These particles are interchangeable in some contexts but not in others. To capture the nuances among them is particularly challenging. Motivated by the limitations of previous studies, this thesis attempts to explore the underlying context-independent semantic system of FPs and account for their surface contextual meanings.; The current study examines the uses of twenty-five final particles based on a spoken Cantonese corpus. Particles that share the same initial are proposed to be conditioned manifestations belonging to the same particle family. Three particle families are analyzed, labeled here as Z-, L- and G-. This thesis first characterizes the core semantic feature associated with each of the particle family. The core feature for each particle family is shared by all the members, namely [+restrictive] for Z-, [+realization of state] for L-, and [+situation given, +focus, +deictic] for G-. The study then demonstrates how these context-independent meanings give rise to previously random-looking senses through semantic extension and pragmatic inference among various linguistic domains, such as sentential, propositional, discourse, epistemic, speech act, de re and de dicto domains. By constructing minimal pairs, co-occurence restriction tests and felicity tests, the thesis proceeds to suggest a bundle of distinctive, functional primes that can distinguish a given manifestation from those of other members.; This thesis provides, for the first time, a systematic account of a subset of final particles in modern standard Cantonese. It is believed the methodology developed in this thesis, with whatever further refinements and changes, can be extended to study the other FPs on the dialect in the future. |
