A Study On The Cantonese Sentence-final Mood Particles In Late Qing Dynasty

The author takes Cantonese modal particles prevailing in the late Qing Dynasty in HongKong, Macao, and Guangzhou area as research object and collects relevant corpus from12earlyliteratures about Cantonese published between1841and1912. Starting from phonology, thepaper firstly translates9initials,9finals and10tone categories related to modal particles thenwith modern phonetic transcription method, and on this basis, it analyzes the member quantity,modal expression, modal function and modal particles in series of early Cantonese modalparticles. Through textual research on example sentences, the paper points out52well-documented early Cantonese modal particles. The lexical collocation between these modalparticles and indicative mood, imperative mood and interrogative mood can be mainly dividedinto “common expression” and “available expression”. The quantitative proportion of variousmodal particles to various modal expression accords with daily communication demand, featuredwith explicit division of labor and flexible variation. Besides, the author makes use of“ingredient removal method” to analyze the modal function of Cantonese modal particles in thelate Qing Dynasty. According to the difference in specific degree of modal function, it classifiesCantonese modal particles in the late Qing Dynasty into the “modal function stratified system”consisting of “structural modality”,“emphatic modality” and “adding modality”. In addition toeffectively classifying and summing up the modal function of modal particles, this system is alsoclosely related to the placement and modal function combination in modal particles used inconjunction. The author believes that such three cases as “ordinal-level combination”,“equal-level combination” and “reverse-level combination” exist in the placement of modalparticles used in conjunction from the perspective of the “modal function stratified system”. Ofthem,“ordinal-level combination” is common and “reverse-level combination” appears inconjunction combination with such two modal particles as tim and lai. In addition, thecombination rules of modal function can be divided into “horizontal superposition” and“stratified superposition” according to this stratified system.“Stratified superposition” alwaysappears with “ordinal-level combination” and “horizontal superposition” always appears with“equal-level combination”. Furthermore, the author carries out a diachronic comparison betweenCantonese modal particles in the late Qing Dynasty and modern Cantonese, and pointes out thetendency that the modal expression range of Cantonese modal particles tended to constantlyexpand to interrogative mood in previous periods, but with little change to modal function, itsoverall situation kept stable.