| Summary: | 博士 === 國立清華大學 === 語言學研究所 === 105 === In this dissertation, we aim to explore three relevant issues on negative imperative sentences in Taiwanese Southern Min (henceforth TSM). The topics discussed are as follows: (1) the syntactic structure and the subject properties of negative imperatives, (2) the interaction among negation, modality and the attached complements, and (3) the core meanings and discourse functions of sentence-final particles and their relative hierarchical positions. The studies primarily adopt Cartographic Approach and Theory of Conversational Implicature for analysis.
According to the data in the corpus of modern TSM, the first study in this dissertation at first makes a distinction between negative imperative sentences and negative indicative sentences with deontic modals in TSM. Then it is intended to characterize the syntactic structure of negative imperatives and explain how the subject gets the feature [+addressee]. Further, it suggests that the first person singular pronoun (i.e., gua2) legally be the subject of negative imperatives though its rate of appearance is quite low in the corpus data. By contrast, the third person pronoun (i.e., i1 and in1) can hardly be regarded as the subject of negative imperative sentences owing to the fact that their property of being a bystander in a conversation conflicts with the feature [+addressee].
Next, the second study examines the interaction among negation, modality and the complements attached in terms of the properties of verbs, lexical aspects, and meanings in order to learn about the collocations of the imperative mood and a variety of verbs. It is found that the properties of physical volitionality, controlness, and telicity play parts in deciding the combination between modals and verbs. On the other hand, this study also attempts to elaborate on how imperative sentences are formed to deliver different-level powers of imperatives based on what kind of adverbs, final particles, subjects, or even vocatives are chosen to modify the imperative sentences.
Then the third study, according to the spoken data in the corpus, explores the core meanings and discourse functions of five sentence-final particles (henceforth SFPs) which most frequently appear in the context of negative imperatives. It is found that the five SFPs separately have their own core meanings and play different roles in the discourse. The study also takes a further step to make a comparison among these final particles to make an order of their relevant hierarchical positions. The hierarchical structure of these SFPs is shown from low to high as follows: Clow (leh1, ah1) < AttitudeP (leh2, ah2, lah, ooh) < ForceP (honn).
To sum up, this dissertation intends to investigate three issues on negative imperatives from the perspectives of syntax, semantics and pragmatics. According to the analysis of the syntactic structure of negative imperatives, it mainly illustrates the properties of subjects in negative imperatives. Based on the properties of verbs, it primarily explores the relationship among negation, modality, and verbs in negative imperatives. And within the context of negative imperatives, it seeks to find out the core meanings, discourse functions and relative hierarchical positions of sentence-final particles. We expect these studies can verify the compatibility of theories adopted inhere and provide some further understanding of TSM, one of the important dialects spoken in Taiwan.
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