irrationale
Tetraglot
Senior Member
China
Joined 6052 days ago
669 posts - 1023 votes 
2 sounds
Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog
Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese
| Message 1 of 2 04 May 2009 at 7:09am | IP Logged |
Ok, I am still trying to intuit when it is appropriate to use this particle, 啊. I know, I know, in time I will just "get a feel", but can any non-native chinese speaker shed some light on their observation when to use this particle?
I saw someone's thesis on the internet that said it the following;
Quote:
| This is an empirical study of the Chinese modal particle a which occurs predominantly in sentence-final positions. It is one of the most frequently used sentence/modal particles and yet pragmatic and semantic descriptions of the particle in the literature are sketchy and inadequate. In order to capture the uses and the underlying meanings of the particle, a large body of discourse data was obtained from the popular Chinese TV drama series Kewang Expectations. Out of the total of 50 episodes of the series, the first 20 (about 20 hours in length) were transcribed which yielded a data script of more than 142000 Chinese characters with a total of 1829 instances of the particle all used in meaningful conversational situations. Within these contexts of use, the particle occurrences were analysed and categorized and on this basis characterization of the particle was made in terms of its use and meaning. Following this empirical and inductive approach, it is found that the particle is encoded with three basic modal meanings which are: volitive, exclamative, and surprisive. The volitive indexes the speakers strong wish that a situation will occur in a certain way and especially that the addressee will behave in a certain way towards what is said by the speaker. The use of the particle in the volitive adds an emphatic note to the utterance it is attached to. The particle in the exclamative conveys an intense state of the speakers strong emotion of one kind or another. The exclamative meaning usually makes its presence in exclamative sentences and in affirmative assertions and formulaic social expressions. The surprisive meaning indicates the speakers surprised feeling towards a given situation verbally presented or related to what is said by the speaker. The particle in the surprisive occurs with declaratives, imperatives and it helps form confirmation questions and rhetorical and reproach types of questions which take the form of a declarative sentence. Some of the utterances in the data are exclamatory also due to the presence of the particle used in its surprisive meaning. This study is an attempt at achieving a better understanding of one of the most frequently used Mandarin modal items which are known for being notoriously elusive in their pragmatic and semantic functions. It is hoped that this study will provide inspirations for studies of similar kind on other modal items in the Chinese language. |
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Basically, "volitive", “surprisive” and "exclaimatory". What do you think? Also, is it just me or do more girls seem to use this particle?
Edited by irrationale on 04 May 2009 at 7:10am
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furyou_gaijin
Senior Member
Japan
Joined 6388 days ago
540 posts - 631 votes
Speaks: Latin*
| Message 2 of 2 10 May 2009 at 3:01pm | IP Logged |
Yes, the best way is to ditch lengthy explanations and "get a feel". 啊 is highly addictive, though: I even have a
tendency to insert 啊 and 啦 when I speak other languages... fully understanding that this means taking over bad
habits of some of my Chinese friends but really can't help it at times!!!
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