閩南語句末語氣詞 le/leh 的研究

Li (1999), in her study of variants of le/ne in Taiwanese Southern Min, concludes that le/ne that occurs at the end of an utterance is a discourse marker of contrast with various interpretations derived from its interaction with specific contextual features outside of a sentence. More recently, Chen (2020) suggests that the mood particle leh4that occurs at the end of a sentence serves the functions such as confirmation and emphasis and is derived from the continuous marker leh4. In this paper, I propose that the continuous marker has become a mirative marker, marking new information that is surprising or unexpected to the speaker.