Cantonese is rich in sentence-final particles (SFPs),morphemes serving to show various linguistic or attitudinalmeanings. The acoustic manifestations of these SFPs are notyet clear. This paper presents detailed analyses of thefundamental frequency tracings, final F_0, final velocity andduration of ten SFPs in Hong Kong Cantonese. The resultsshow that most of these SFPs are very similar to the lexicaltones in terms of the F_0 measurements, but the durations aresignificantly different in half the cases. The notabledifferences may give some insight into the nature of thisspecial class of words.
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