A Systemic Functional Contrastive Analysis of Interpersonal Particles in Cantonese and Portuguese

摘要

This paper reports a contrastive study carried out under the systemic functional multilingual studies framework. More specifically, it compares and contrasts the functions of interpersonal particles in Cantonese and Portuguese. Halliday & Matthiessen (2004) state that exchange is enacted in language through speech function, which in turn is realized by MOOD. A corpus based on social-semiotic processes (Matthiessen, Teruya & Wu, 2008) was collected and the grammatical patterns of SPEECH FUNCTION realization were retrieved. With reference to this methodology, it is possible to identify the functions of interpersonal particles in Cantonese and Portuguese and describe them in the generalized form of system networks. There are approximately 30 basic particles in Cantonese with more than 70 different combinations (Kwok, 1984: 8-11). In terms of the interpersonal meaning, many of them realize MOOD and/or speaker's attitude towards a proposition or proposal. Experientially, some of them serve as aspect markers. In Portuguese, declarative Mood realizes statements and questions and imperative Mood realizes commands. Interpersonal particles parallel with those in Cantonese that they add further meaning to the arguability of propositions. They are deployed by the speaker as strategies to cause the listener to be guided to the speaker's attitude towards a proposition or proposal and contribute to propel dialog. Interpersonal particles in Cantonese and Portuguese will be presented as well as how their functions contrast.