A generalized syntactic schema for utterance particles in Chinese
Sze‐Wing Tang · Lingua Sinica · 2015
A novel analysis of the syntax of utterance particles in Chinese is proposed in this paper. In terms of their diachronic origin, there are two types of utterance particles in Chinese, namely predicative utterance particles and non-predicative utterance particles, both of which are derived by a generalized syntactic schema. It is proposed that utterance particles are the complement of a functional category, forming a conjunction structure. The schema can be applied to other sentence-final expressions in Chinese and English, leading to a conjecture that sentence-final expressions are not heads.