My Project

The goal of my project is to analyze language by bringing dualities into a larger conversation with cultural complexity

Sentence-Final Particles (SFPs)

What are they? 🤷🏻‍♂️

Untranslatable, colloquial characters (words) placed at the end of an utterance that bring nuance, character, and expression to a sentence

Let’s look at some examples. All of the following sentences use the sentence 佢喺嗰度 (“He is there”), with the addition of sentence-final particles (in bold):

As we can see, the same sentence carries a much different meaning depending on the SFP that is being used

Even when two particles are written with the same character, they can still slightly differ in their implications because of their tones

In linguistics, tone is a variation in pitch quality. Cantonese has six tones:

Credit: Open Cantonese

My research focuses on two SFPs: laa1 and laa3 (the numbers indicate tone)

Both laa1 and laa3 use the character 啦, but they are still quite different

Before we talk more about these two SFPs, let’s first listen to two clips, and see if you can hear the difference between the two:

My Claim

Family Structure

Family structure is crucial for understanding power and other aspects of Hong Kong society

Over the years, the HK government has been adopting more and more family-oriented policies

“The
Council is in effect taking the family as the cornerstone and the most important unit of
society”

Study from HKU Department of Sociology

With family being a cornerstone of HK society, the concept of “family” is no longer just series of relationships connected by blood; it’s an expanded network of people bonded by familiarity

Analyzing sentence-final particles through the lens of family structure and familiarity is extremely generative because it presents us with a sophisticated system of relationships

Let’s look through the slides below to see how family ties in with SFPs:

So there are definitely other factors to consider besides family and familiarity

Nevertheless, these two concepts provide us with crucial background into HK society that allows us to understand the flexible dynamics between speakers and their SFPs

How can we find data on family, familiarity, etc. to provide support for my claims?

Case Study: The Movie “Faithfully Yours”

Movies are wonderful sources of data for linguistics, especially sociolinguistics

In addition to an abundance of dialogue, movies also provide us with complex relationships between characters, which are crucial for tying language to society

For this project, comedy is a necessity, and here’s why:

After hours of data collection done by ✨yours truly✨, here’s some interesting results that I found:

Proportions of laa1 and laa3 (overall and by gender)

There is no indication of a masculine bias for laa3, but laa1 is shown to have a high percentage for female speakers

Does this mean that laa1 should be categorized with a feminine bias?

Not necessarily

Take for example the mother in “Faithfully Yours”

Since she is the mother of another character named Ying, I call her YM (Ying’s mother)

60% of YM’s laa particles are laa1, which initially points to a gendered bias

However, we need to examine this more closely in order to draw conclusions … slideshow time!

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What conclusions can we make?

1. We should not focus on a strict, dualistic gendered bias for understanding SFPs
2. It is of the utmost importance to contextualize SFPs using societal structures of Hong Kong
3. Context, context, context! SFPs are extremely flexible and multifaceted

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Now, let’s discuss “the three men”

Who exactly are they? 🤷🏻‍♂️

Happy, Big Eye, and Puddin (who I group up as H,B,P) are the main protagonists of “Faithfully Yours”

H,B,P frequently use both laa1 and laa3 when speaking with YM, YF, and Ying

Here’s an overall summary of their SFP use:

Who is being spoken to?	laa1	laa3
Ying’s Mother and Father	Pleasing the parents, attempting to form a closer relationship with them, respecting them by acknowledging their authority	Expressing competence in their ability to support Ying
Ying	Showing that they care, speaking gently (this is especially the case with Big Eye, who is portrayed as the gentlest person to Ying)	Again, expressing competence in their ability to support Ying, displaying independence and knowledge

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What conclusions can we make?

While heavily based on structures of power and family, their uses of laa1 and laa3 are still extremely flexible and dependent on the speaker’s intent

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Let’s look at a scene from the movie

H,B,P are showing Ying their new apartment, and they are using laa3 a lot to show their competence and reliability

See if you can hear all the laa3s (there are 3!)

Did you hear all of them?

According to timestamp of video sample	According to timestamp of movie
0:01	50:48
0:06	50:54
0:14	51:01

14 seconds is all we need to know just how competent the three men are!

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So now we know everything about sentence-final particles, right?

There are still so many particles to research—laa1 and laa3 are just the tip of the iceberg

This project is a reminder that a language should be understood in the context of the language itself

Meaning that languages like Cantonese can not be studied from the lens of the English language

Placing SFPs in strict categories may be the easier method, but it surely does not reveal to us their true linguistic depth and fabulousness

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