The Syntactic And Semantic Study Of Chinese Sentence Final Particle “ba”(吧)

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the typical modern Chinese sentence-final particle “ba” based on the theory of semantic grammar. By means of the corpus of Center for Chinese Linguistics PUK, the author summarizes previous studies, and try to deeply analyze the particle’s simple sentence distribution rules and semantic meanings, it’s complex sentence distribution rules and semantic relations, and it’s pragmatic functions and syntactic statuses. According to the above, this thesis will builds and verifies the semantic map of “ba”.Chapter One mainly summarizes and comments correlational studies of different grammar factions and points out main purposes of this thesis. Chapter Two focuses on simple sentences, try to get the distribution rules and semantic meanings of “ba”, then extract the central semantic meaning, that is to say “uncertainty”, and build a semantic map. Chapter Three focuses on complex sentences, aiming at inspecting the semantic relations between sentence with “ba” and previous or next ones, than discussing and explaining the distribution rules of sentences with “ba” in different complex sentence types according to “uncertainty”. Chapter Four, based on the “uncertainty” meaning of sentence with “ba”, generalizes it’s pragmatic functions and selectivities to reply or elicit from positive and negative aspects. Chapter Five resolves the syntactic statuses of “ba”, which can also be explained by “uncertainty”, from a formal verification perspective with the help of some norms, such as adverbs, high-predicates, persons, sentence patterns and co-occurrences with other sentence-final particles. The last chapter concluded that “ba” is a multi-function sentence-final particle which can be used in different sentence categories and different sentence patterns, then, points out the innovation and deficiency of this thesis in the hope of urging the study of sentence-final particle more and more subtilized and scientific.