Discourse Particles in Asian Languages Volume I

This is the first of two volumes 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.

Elin McCready is Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Aoyama Gakuin University, Japan. Hiroki Nomoto is Associate Professor of Malay Language and Linguistics at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan.

Introduction; 1. On the mirative use of the no (da) construction in Japanese; 2. Evidentiality, inference, conclusion: Japanese no as a particle and complementizer; 3. Mandarin Chinese sentence-final de as a marker of private evidence; 4. How are contrasts marked? - the case of ne in in Mandarin Chinese; 5. Cantonese question particles; 6. Softness, assertiveness and their expression via Cantonese sentence-final particles; 7. Formality weakening and the underspecified expressive yo in Korean