句末助詞的類型與歷時演變—從兩個詞項談起

From an investigation into two atypical sentence-final particles, 'honnh' and 'hannh' in Taiwanese, this study excavates a crosslinguistic group of words that are essentially miniature sentences. Unlike any other sentence-final particles, 'honnh' and 'hannh' can be repeated independently without their sentence stem. Moreover, they subcategorize their sentence stem when they are attached to one. Third, they only follow other sentence-final particles but never the other way around. Fourth, they do not behave like tag questions. All these observations pose a question to the status of these two misfits. Additionally, we see their counterparts in Austronesian languages like Amis and C'uli' Atayal, Indo-European languages like German, and languages in East Asia like Japanese, Northern Mandarin, and Southwestern Mandarin. This study suggests subsuming all these elements under the group called sentence-words, the label once assigned only to 'yes' and 'no' in the literature (West 1896:173; Sonnenschein 1916:54). This study not only challenges the scheme in which all sentence-final particles are considered homogeneously in a hierarchical order but also reveals the interaction between two sentential units. It further pushes the frontiers of syntax and may redefine the syntax-pragmatics interface.