Summary

Affective Sentence-Final Particles (ASPs) in Mandarin discourse reflect the stances of conversation participants. Linguists still don't know much about how ASPs are distributed in discourse, what stylistic functions they serve, and how their use has changed over time. Some ASPs are popularly associated with the performance of cuteness among young women, but this notion has yet to be extensively evaluated.

This study, undertaken in cooperation with Huihsin Tseng of Yahoo! Labs, draws from a corpus of Taiwanese television dramas to examine how the use of ASPs has changed over time. The language of scripted television has been shown to reflect wider usage, and to influence language change (Tagliamonte & Roberts 2005, Stuart-Smith 2006). Taiwanese dramas are particularly significant due to the popularity of Taiwanese media and its linguistic influence in other regions. This study also presents an opportunity to examine the impact of policy changes since the 1980’s that have relaxed rules on standard Mandarin.

So far, we have analyzed ASPs on two programs: Professor Hoe (鋤頭博士) (1989), and Devil Beside You (惡魔在身邊) (2005). 362 minutes of footage have been analyzed, with 883 ASPs coded in total, including a (啊), la (啦), na (吶), ya (呀) , o (喔 / 哦), lo(u) (嘍 / 囖) , ei/ye (耶 / 欸), lei (嘞 / 咧), and me (嘛). Sociolinguistic information was also recorded for each major character.

Stay tuned for full results! If you have thoughts about ei/ye, we'd love to hear them.

Papers

No papers yet for this project.