新加坡华语会话中语气词的语用功能 = A STUDY ON THE PRAGMATIC PARTICLES IN SINGAPORE MANDARIN

Abstract

Singapore is a multi-cultural society and many Singaporeans like to mix a bit of English, dialect or Malay when they speak Mandarin. Thus, forming Singapore’s own unique vocabulary and pragmatic particles. Although there are many pragmatic particles in Singapore Mandarin, but little research has been done in this area. This thesis aims to fill this gap. We have randomly selected 8 sets of 15-minute, i.e. 120 minutes of conversation from 7 hours of conversation recordings for transcribing. The speakers are Singaporean Chinese, they are either undergraduates or graduates from local universities, age ranging from 22-23 years old. From the 120 minutes of transcription, we have collected a sample of 2576 pragmatic particles. This shows that the frequency of pragmatic particles appearing in Singapore Mandarin conversation is very high. In the first chapter, we will discuss the scope and aims of this paper. In the second chapter, we will define what are pragmatic particles and back channel; we will also discuss the studies of pragmatic particles in Chinese and Singapore Colloquial English. In the third chapter, we will discuss about the 5 different categories of pragmatic particles in Singapore Mandarin. We will also discuss the relationship between back channel and pragmatic particles. In the fourth chapter, we will look at a few commonly used pragmatic particles with multiple functions. We have discovered that pragmatic particles are not random occurrences; they appear in a regular pattern and some of them may perform multiple functions. The various functions of the pragmatic particles can be determined by its tone, stress and length of the pragmatic particles uttered, etc. Due to the length limit of this paper, we will only focus our attention on pragmatic particles with varying tones. Previous studies on local pragmatic particles have been focused on only 11 pragmatic particles such as "lah" ， "mah" and "lor" but from our recordings, we have collected 61 types of pragmatic particles with different syllables or 125 types of pragmatic particles with different tones and syllables. Therefore, this thesis is touching on areas of the study of pragmatic particles that has not been attempted before by other researchers. The study of pragmatic particles can be extended further into other areas such as gender and dialect group usage patterns.