A Study on the Compound Particles in Cantonese.

摘要

Cantonese is renowned for having a rich inventory of sentence final particles which can express a large variety of meanings, such as time, focus and mood, etc. They have attracted a lot of interest in the literature. In daily conversations, particles can be used individually or successively. When they co-occur, they are located at different levels in the syntactic hierarchy. Even more intriguing is that there are some sentence final particles consisting of two or more syllables, which are known as "compound particles", such as baa2laa1 and hai2laa1. Previous studies suggest that they are different from the successive use of particles, because the two or more syllables in a compound particle attach to the preceding clause as a whole. The thesis investigates the semantic meanings and grammatical properties of compound particles. It also explores the syntactic structure of compound particles and argues that they are derived in syntax.;In addition to baa2laa1 and hai2laa1, the thesis considers also ding2laa1 and dak1gaa2 as compound particles. All of them consist of a predicative element and a functional element. Semantically, they are closely related to their components. The thesis demonstrates that different semantic meanings conveyed by a single compound particle are derived by metaphorical projections among various linguistic domains, such as the content, epistemic and speech act domains.;In terms of grammatical properties, the thesis has found that compound particles impose more constraints on the various constituents in the clauses that they are attached to, whereas the combinations of monosyllabic sentence final particles and the preceding clauses are less restricted or almost free. This phenomenon reveals the close relationship between compound particles and their preceding clauses, which can be interpreted as a kind of selectional relation.;For this reason, the thesis proposes that compound particles are decomposed into [root (predicative element) + suffix (functional element)] in the underlying syntactic structure. The predictive element is the head of VP which selects a clause as its complement. The predicative element moves from V to T to C and forms a compound with the suffixes that are located at T and C. The surface word order is derived by further movement of the clause.;From the above analysis, the thesis re-examines the nature of "compound particles" and "successive use of particles". It suggests that they are consistent in their underlying structures with each of the elements occupies the head position of different phrases. The major difference between them is that every particle in a sequence can be used independently, whereas the predicative element in a compound particle cannot be separated from the suffix. Moreover, the thesis reveals the possible grammaticalization of the sentence final elements.