Talk:Sentence-final particle

Work

This article needs to be seriously worked on! A couple of suggestions, for starters:

• The article's title should be "Sentence particle" rather than "Sentince final particle", because the circumstance of these being final particles in some languages is not necessarily essential (cross-linguistically) to the concept of a particle with the kind of function that distinguishes the class of particles under consideration.

• This points towards my second point: the article should be kept non-language-specific (not limited to Cantonese and Thai).

I agree, I added what I could but unfortunately the only information I have is for Mandarin. I can list Shinobu's European examples but can't offer any discussion of them, and what I wrote about the functions of SFPs in Mandarin may not apply to all the other languages.Politizer (talk) 05:59, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

• The description of such particles as "utterances" is incorrect. If the intention of calling them "utterances" and then stating that "It (sic) does not carry any meaning by themselves" is to characterise them as particles, this can be done more economically by referring by an internal link to the Wikipedia article on Particles. --A R King 19:27, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

• Added information and greatly expanded a section about Mandarin-Chinese. 68.37.196.171 (talk) 23:17, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

Other European languages?

If European languages are to be discussed here, it's easy to come up with much better examples than the English ones given in the article. Like hè, toch (Dutch), no (Spanish), ja (Dutch, German, Low-Saxon; regional), maybe there are more? Shinobu 09:09, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

Sure, there are such in many European languages - the French "quoi", the Swedish "va" and probably many other one. Either move away from "Examples" as heading and aim for a more complete set or keep "as examples"... 83.57.182.100 (talk) 17:51, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

Language-neutral account

We need a language-neutral discussion of sentence-final particles in general. What I have written so far about the function and use of particles is mostly based on data from Chinese languages (which is where a lot of the research on this has been done) but if anyone knows more language-neutral stuff it would be very welcome; the best thing would probably be if someone could re-write my Structure and Uses section with language-neutral stuff and then what I wrote can be subsumed into a section just for Mandarin (maybe a subsection of the Examples section). --Politizer (talk) 02:33, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

I know that there quite a bit of work on sentence-final particles in Japanese, and a large literature on discourse particles that is somewhat more cross-linguistic, but as far as I know these literatures don't really speak to one another. I'm not familiar with the work on Sino-Tibetan. Cnilep (talk) 18:56, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

Same here. There is a lot of stuff on Mandarin SFPs (and also on other Chinese languages and some related languages like Burmese, although I'm only very familiar with the Mandarin stuff) that I could easily add but just haven't gotten around to (it would be fairly easy to reproduce the whole list from Chao, 1968, and some of the other big texts)...but I'm not aware of any that address SFPs in general, rather than just Chinese ones in particular. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs (formerly Politizer) 18:59, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

I've got a nice new source, there was a poster at the Linguistic Society of America conference this weekend. I'm traveling right now and the handout I took is at home, but I'll check it out and try to update the article when I get back. (Hopefully they will have an actual article in the Proceedings whenever that comes out.) The citation is here:

• Del Gobbo, Francesca; Poletto, Cecilia (2010). "On sentential particles: A cross-linguistic study". Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America.

rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 01:39, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

"Phrase Suffixes"

The text as it is calls sentence-final particles "phrase suffixes." How are these different from Clitics? The cited text is 40 years old, could it be that there is new terminology since then? Alex Dodge (talk) 23:34, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

The text doesn't "call" them phrase suffixes, it points out (in a historical note) that one famous linguist called them that. I don't really see the relationship to clitics. rʨanaɢ (talk) 14:36, 31 August 2011 (UTC)