Promising approaches for the analysis of sentence-final particles in Cantonese

The main objective of this paper is to analyze the meanings and moods of the most frequently used particle [aa3] in various types of modern Cantonese sentences. Promising and feasible approaches of ‘Minimal Pair’ and ‘Maximal Common Induction’ are introduced to depict the pattern of the use of Cantonese particles microscopically and macroscopically so as to establish a better grammatical description of the language. The possibilities that may occur when a sentence ends with a final particle are also discussed in this work. Copyright © 2008 Canadian Center of Science and Education.