Derived Heads Of Cantonese Left Periphery And Cartographic Distributions Of Its Sentence Final Particles

Cantonese has a rich inventory of sentence final particles,which has a high value of linguistic research.Previous works have showed that there are more than 30 SFPs in Cantonese and some even identified 90.Obligatorily occurring,they are usually used in daily utterance and make the language more vivid.What’s more important is that many of them are allowed to co-occur.Linguists of Traditional and generative grammar have done some researches on it.However,some problems still exist in these researches and this study tends to solve these problems and provide a new explanation for this special language phenomena from a new theoretical perspective.Based on the researches of Law(1990),Fung(2000),Fang(2003),Sybesma &Li(2007)and Tang(2015b),this research will give a comparative summary of the characteristics or features of Cantonese SFPs.Considering that different scholars may give different labels of the functions of these different sentence final particles,this research will focus mainly on the actual functions of them and give a new uniform label system.After the reclassification of these Cantonese SFPs,we will further analyze the phonetic and phonological characteristics of these particles.Then we will continue to dig into the co-occurring situations summarized by Law’s research(1990).Under the theoretical framework of cartography,through reclassifying the functions of Cantonese SFPs in the left periphery and digging into the phonetic and phonological components of them,this paper proposes that there are six original forms ‘a3,ga3,la3,ma3,wa3,za3’ of these Cantonese SFPs while other sentence final particles are their variants,which can be realized through the approach of changing nucleus,tone or both.And this is lexical operation instead of syntactic one.More importantly,these variants share the same syntactic slots on the structural tree with their original forms.Then with Law’s(1990)summary of co-occurring situations as our major reference and word order as our criterion,we clear up the fixed order of these sentence final particles,label them in accordance with their respective functions and come up with the final hierarchy of ‘TP < DegP < FinP < FocP < EvaP < ForceP < SAttP < HAttP’.