Discourse Particles in Asian Languages Volume II: Southeast Asia

ISBN-13: 9781138482449 / Angielski

Elin McCready; Hiroki Nomoto

Opis

This volume is the second in a two-part collection of research on discourse particles focusing exclusively on the languages of Asia from the perspective of formal as well as non-formal semantics and pragmatics.

Despite increasing interest in discourse particles, most research in the area (particularly within formal semantics and pragmatics) focuses on a restricted set of languages, and there has been little consensus on the proper formal treatment of particles. The term ‘discourse particles’ has been used to cover a broad range of phenomena, including such things as ‘sentence final particles,’ ‘discourse adverbs’ and other related phenomena. In recent years, there has been extensive development of the formal approach to discourse particles, which often treats these words as devices for marking information updates. It is vital however, to extend this data to non-Western languages like Malay, Thai or Vietnamese. These two volumes are the first to give an exclusive focus on particles in non-European languages (in this case Asian languages), from the perspective of formal and non-formal semantics and pragmatics. This second volume includes chapters on Tagalog, Kimaragang Dusun (Malaysia), Malay, Singlish (Colloquial Singapore English), Thai and Vietnamese. The chapters are informed by recent theoretical work in formal and non-formal semantics and pragmatics relating to the meaning of particles. The collection contributes to our theoretical understanding of the meaning of discourse particles and to empirical knowledge of discourse particles in the languages of Asia. It will be of interest to postgraduate students and scholars of semantics and pragmatics.

Spis treści

1 Tagalog pala: An unsurprising case of mirativity  2 Discourse particles in Tagalog: The case of e  3 A Kimaragang status particle: accessible information  4 A syntactic universal in a contact language: The story of Singlish already  5 On the discourse marker dah in Colloquial Malay (and sudah in Sabah Malay)  6 On the apparently non-additive use of Malay additive pun  7 A unified analysis of (some) discourse particles in Thai  8 Interpersonal uses of the pragmatic particle /kɔ̂ɔ/ in Thai conversation  9 A scalar semantics for the Vietnamese sentence-final particle cơ  10 Syntax-information structure interface in Vietnamese

O autorze

Hiroki Nomoto is Associate Professor of Malay Language and Linguistics at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan.

Elin McCready is Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Aoyama Gakuin University, Japan.