Abstract:

Sentence-final or modal particles in the Chinese language are in the first place used to convey the attitude of the speaker to the situation or a fact of reality; they belong to functional words, but they mark the whole sentence and even the whole text; they are deprived of the meaning of their own out of the context in synchrony, however, each particle has a number of functional meanings due to their etymology in the diachrony. For a deeper understanding of this phenomenon, it is important to know the changes in functional meanings of sentence-final particles, which reflect both the evolution of expressive and connotative meanings of a sentence and the development of scientific ideas concerning the place and the role of sentence-final particles in the language. Since I century AD these particles have become the object of descriptions and studies in the works of Chinese linguists. They have formed their own particular approach to the study of this phenomenon during more than two thousand years of the development of the scientific thought in the Chinese linguistic tradition.

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