Investigating the semantic/pragmatic function(s) of the Cantonese sentence final particle aa3

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the semantic/ pragmatic functions of the Cantonese sentence final particle (SFP) aa3, with three research questions: 1) what are the major functions of SFP aa3, 2) among the functions, which ones are the most frequently expressed by the data found in ‘The Hong Kong Cantonese Corpus’, and 3) how does SFP aa3 help express epistemic modality. The study has classified five functions of aa3, namely 1) serving to soften the tone, 2) marking speakers’ subjective evaluations, 3) increasing the politeness of utterances, 4) expressing speakers’ intolerance, and 5) emphasizing information. The analysis shows that the first two classified functions are the most frequently expressed by the corpus data. Moreover, based on the corpus data, the present study also proposes a novel notion that SFP aa3 helps express epistemic modality, namely the three subtypes – speculative modality, deductive modality and assumptive modality. Their differences lie in whether the speaker is guessing, inferring from obvious evidence in the conversation, or inferring from common sense. It is hoped that the present study will provide a better understanding of the semantic/ pragmatic functions of the SFPs in general, and those of the SFP aa3 in particular.