Three Plane Investigations Of The Modal Particle "ma" And Its Teaching Design

This article takes the modern Chinese modal particle "Ma(?)" as the research object,with the aid of the CCL Modern Chinese Corpus of the Chinese Linguistics Research Center of Peking University,BCC corpus and other retrieval methods,we examines the three dimensions of syntax,semantics and pragmatics of the modality "Ma".This article mainly includes four parts:From the perspective of grammatical distribution,the modal particle "Ma" has a flexible syntactic position which can appear in the middle and the end of a single sentence or a compound sentence.In single sentences,it is often located after the subject,preposition structure,and interposition.In compound sentences,it can be used in multiple compound sentence types such as causal compound sentences,transition compound sentences,hypothetical compound sentences,etc.And "Ma" is often located after the related words of coordinate complex sentences,coherent complex sentences and causal complex sentences.As for sentence category distribution,the modal particle "Ma" can appear in four sentence types: declarative sentence,imperative sentence,exclamation sentence and interrogative sentence.From the perspective of modal meaning,the modal particle "Ma" has different modal meanings under different psychological presuppositions.When the speaker's psychological presuppositions are "should know what everyone knows","should know but don't know" and "should know easy to know","Ma" can express a strong reasoning attitude,a dissatisfied mood,or a relaxed and casual tone of speakers.From the perspective of pragmatics,the modal particle "Ma" is used to indicate a pause after a topic.When marking the topic,it highlights the connotation and characteristics of the topic.In the supplementary sentence,the modal particle "Ma" emphasizes the supplementary information and helps explaining the supplementary sentence.And from the point of view of interpersonal function,the modal particle "Ma" has a strong subjective interaction,which is reflected in taking care of the attitude and position of others and take care of the identity and status of others to adjust interpersonal relationship,promote interpersonal communication.By investigating the use of the modal particle "Ma" in the HSK,it is found that the foreign students often replace modal particle "Ma(?)" with modal particle "Ma(?)".Also,the arrangement of the modal particle "Ma" in the existing textbooks was found that has the shortcomings such as single use cases and briefly explanation.Finally,based on the results of the investigation,we design a teaching plan which reflects the personality characteristics of the modal particle "Ma" and meets the learning process of international students.