Abstract
Ba is one of the common used sentence-final particle in Chinese. This paper studies the spoken language of film and television drama to analyze and verify the pragmatic functions of “ba” by means of the multidimensional study of language form, meaning, pragmatics and phonetics. First, from the perspective of different category distribution of the imperative sentence, it probes into the distribution rules of “ba”, the co-occurrence with adverbs, auxiliary verbs etc, and reveals the grammatical meaning. Statistical analysis shows that the use of modal particles is the marked form of the imperative sentence. Among them, ba is the most frequently used, and its core meaning is Suggestion Discussion. Secondly, through the semantic analysis of “ba” in terms of Discourse Politeness Theory, it concludes that “ba” can serve the purpose of softening the manner of speaking and the degree of courtesy/discourtesy. Thirdly, from the perspective of phonetic experiment, the phonetic features of the sentence-final particle ba under different functions, were observed and analyzed, which again verified the rationality of our pragmatic classification. Thus, it is proved that the elements of language do not exist in isolation, and the characteristics of function words such as sentence-final particle can be better revealed by studying them from the comprehensive perspective of form, meaning, pragmatics and phonetics.
Highlights
As one of the typical Chinese modal particle, ba has always been the focus and difficulty of grammatical research
(2) There is deficiency in the oral-corpus-based comprehensive study on distribution of ba, so the core meanings defined previously can hardly cover all usage of ba. (3) There is a lack in phonetic research and verification on the various pragmatic function of ba
From the usage of ba in imperative sentences and with I love my family as the corpus material, this essay takes DP Theory as the theoretical framework and focuses on three questions: (1) What is the Communication and Linguistics Studies 2018; 4(3): 80-87 core grammatical meaning of ba in oral language? (2) How does it work in the regulatory mechanism of politeness in communication? and (3) How does its duration feature vary with the change of function? (I love my family is a reality-reflecting family sitcom based on the spoken language of Beijing people and highly suitable for our research and this essay.)
Summary
As one of the typical Chinese modal particle, ba has always been the focus and difficulty of grammatical research. After the introduction of structuralism to China, some researchers tried to make a description of its distribution and usage [5; 6] some researchers, represented by Lu Yuming (1984) and Hu Mingyang (1981), tried another way They attempted to define the core meaning and usage of ba with analysis of its numerous different textual meanings and usage. Afterwards, researchers started to carry out a more comprehensive study on the core meaning of ba with respect to textual function, modal characteristics and pragmatic function and defined it as expression of hesitation [7,8,9,10]. From the usage of ba in imperative sentences and with I love my family as the corpus material, this essay takes DP Theory as the theoretical framework and focuses on three questions: (1) What is the Communication and Linguistics Studies 2018; 4(3): 80-87 core grammatical meaning of ba in oral language? From the usage of ba in imperative sentences and with I love my family as the corpus material, this essay takes DP Theory as the theoretical framework and focuses on three questions: (1) What is the Communication and Linguistics Studies 2018; 4(3): 80-87 core grammatical meaning of ba in oral language? (2) How does it work in the regulatory mechanism of politeness in communication? and (3) How does its duration feature vary with the change of function? (I love my family is a reality-reflecting family sitcom based on the spoken language of Beijing people and highly suitable for our research and this essay.)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
