Sentence-final particles, including modal particles,[1] interactional particles,[2] etc., are minimal lexemes (words) that occur at the end of a sentence and that do not carry referential meaning, but may relate to linguistic modality, register or other pragmatic effects. Sentence-final particles are common in Chinese, including particles such as Mandarin le 了, ne 呢, ba 吧, ou 哦, a 啊, la 啦, ya 呀, and ma 嗎/吗, and Cantonese lo 囉 and ge 嘅. These particles act as qualifiers of the clause or sentence they end. Sentence-final particles are also present in Japanese[3] and many East Asian languages, such as Thai, and especially in languages that have undergone heavy Sino-Tibetan influence, such as the Monguor languages.
- ^ Lin, Huey Hannah (2005). Contextualizing Linguistic Politeness in Chinese (PhD dissertation). The Ohio State University.
- ^ Morita, Emi (2005). Negotiation of Contingent Talk:The Japanese interactional particles ne and sa. John Benjamins.
- ^ Fox, Barbara (2007), Principles shaping grammatical practices: an exploration., Discourse Studies 9, p. 303