Final Particles

This volume brings together sixteen in-depth studies of final particles in various languages of the world, offering a rich variety of approaches to this still relatively underresearched class of elements. The volume is of interest to typologists, to experts in syntax and the analysis of spoken language, and to linguists studying the form and function of final particles in single languages. Final particles offers an overview of the different types of final particles found in typologically distinct languages, different methological approaches to the study of final particles, and of typical grammaticalization pathways that these elements have taken in different languages.

The Japanese sentence-final particles, "ne," "yo" and "yone" have proved notoriously difficult to explain and are especially challenging for second language users. This book investigates the role of the particles in talk-in-interaction with the aim of providing a comprehensive understanding that accounts for their pragmatic properties and sequential functions and that provides a sound basis for second language pedagogy. This study starts by setting up an original particle function hypothesis based on the figure/ground "gestalt," and then tests its validity empirically with unmarked, marked and native/non-native talk-in-interaction data. The analysis illustrates not only expectable but also unexpected or strategic use of particles, as well as the problems posed for native speakers by non-native speakers whose use of particles is idiosyncratic. The study demonstrates that the proposed hypothesis is capable of accounting for all the uses of particles in the extensive and varied data set examined. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in pragmatics and CA and to teachers of Japanese as a foreign language.

Discourse markers and modal particles are fuzzy linguistic categories that are difficult to describe. The contributions in this volume go beyond this statement. They discuss the intersection between modal particles and discourse markers and examine whether or not it is possible to draw a line between these two types of linguistic expressions. On the basis of new synchronic and diachronic data, from speech and writing, from European and Asian languages or cross-linguistically, the authors answer the question whether discourse markers and modal particles are distinct categories, whether they form a cline, or whether modal particles are a subcategory of discourse markers. This common question shows up throughout all chapters, which makes the book to a coherent whole. By disentangling the complexity of categorizing multifunctional expressions, this book also sheds new light on the processes of meaning extension. The traditional discourse and modal functions are complemented by interactional and textual ones. A must read for functional linguists.

From the master of Singlish himself! Following on the success of his 2017 hit, Spiaking Singlish: A Companion to How Singaporeans Communicate, Gwee Li Sui is back with a series of three “Leeter” books covering the quintessential features of Singlish, Singapore’s unofficial language – written in Singlish! In this first volume, we delve into what is known as the end-particle: “a modifier that primarily comes at the end of a sentence or a clause. Its appearance changes the meaning of the whole construction – yes, it is that powderful one! We will look at a whole bunch of them: lah, leh, ler, lor, loh, liao, ha, ah, hor, wor, mah, meh, siol, sial, sia, eh, nia, neh, and bah. Some are long-long oredi got use although their uses may have evolved. Others are sibeh new even to my ears!"

The articles collected in this volume offer new perspectives into the relevance of notions such as topic, antitopic, contrastive topic, focus, verum focus and theticity for the analysis of the syntax and semantics of modal particles, sentence-final particles and other medial, sentential and illocutive particles. This book addresses three great questions in a variety of languages ranging from Japanese to Mohawk, including Basque, French, German, Italian, Kazakh, Spanish and Turkish, with some insights from English and Russian. The first question is the role played by information-structural strategies such as left dislocations, clefts or the morphological marking of focus in the rise of discourse particles. In the second part, papers are concerned with the relevance of information structure for the study of polysemic and polyfunctional discourse particles. Finally, the contribution of particles to the determination of the information-structural profile of the clause is examined, as well as their role in the information-structural specification of illocutionary types. Language-specific papers alternate with comparative approaches in order to show how newer insights on information structure can help resolve some of the classical issues of the linguistic research on particles.

The Japanese sentence-final particles, ne, yo and yone have proved notoriously difficult to explain and are especially challenging for second language users. This book investigates the role of the particles in talk-in-interaction with the aim of providing a comprehensive understanding that accounts for their pragmatic properties and sequential functions and that provides a sound basis for second language pedagogy. This study starts by setting up an original particle function hypothesis based on the figure/ground gestalt, and then tests its validity empirically with unmarked, marked and native/non-native talk-in-interaction data. The analysis illustrates not only expectable but also unexpected or strategic use of particles, as well as the problems posed for native speakers by non-native speakers whose use of particles is idiosyncratic. The study demonstrates that the proposed hypothesis is capable of accounting for all the uses of particles in the extensive and varied data set examined. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in pragmatics and CA and to teachers of Japanese as a foreign language.

Particles have for the longest time been ignored by linguistic research. School-type grammars ignored them since they did not fit into pre-conceived notions of categories, and since they did not seem to enter into grammatical relations commonly discussed in the genre. Only in the last century did some publications discuss particles – and even then only from the perspective of their discourse and pragmatic functions, i.e. their dependance on certain previous contexts, and concluded that the function of particles for the grammar of sentences and their interpretation remains obscure. The current volume presents 11 new articles that take a fresh look at particles: As it turns out, particles inform many aspects of syntax and semantics, too – both diachronically and synchronically: Particles are shown to have fascinating syntactic properties with respect to projection, locality, movement and scope. Their interpretative contributions can be studied with the rigorous methods of formal semantics. Cross-linguistic and diachronic investigations shed new light on the genesis and development of these intriguing – and under-estimated – kinds of lexical elements.

Monodispersed Particles, Second Edition, covers all aspects of monodispersed particles, including inorganic and polymer particles and their composites. The book consists of four parts: fundamentals, preparation, analyses, and applications. Specifically, the fundamental part covers the theoretical insight into the surface energy of particles and its application to the formulation of the new theories of nucleation, growth and habit formation of monodispersed particles. In addition, the theories of recrystallization and solid-solution formation are introduced. These fundamental theories are applied to the precise control of their size, size distribution, shape, internal structure, and composition, leading to the design of diverse monodispersed functional particles widely used in basic science and modern industry.This second edition is fully updated and revised, detailing new theories and recent progress in the field of nanoparticles, including advanced nucleation theory, arrested growth mechanism for monodispersed nanoparticles, and energetics of habit formation. Additionally, the text covers in-depth insights into the anisotropic growth of Au and Ag nanoparticles, the formation mechanisms of polycrystalline Au spheres, iron oxide nanoparticles in heat-up and hot-injection processes, amorphous TiO2 spheres in a sol-gel system, anatase TiO2 in a gel-sol system and their shape control, AgCl nanoparticles in a reverse micelle system, organic-inorganic hybrid liquid crystals, and extensive biomedical applications. Covers most of the known uniform particles, including inorganic and polymer particles and their composites Includes development of novel fundamental theories of formation mechanisms, full of the author's own original ideas, and detailed background discussion on recent progress in the feild of nanoparticles and the latest advances in their applications Features 2000 bibliographic references, providing a comprehensive guide to related study