Subtle nuances of particle usage in Sinitic languages and topolects

Let's take the following three utterances that superficially and essentially all say the same thing — "give me face":

1.

Gěi wǒ gè miànzi ba 給我個面子吧

2.

Gěi gè miànzi ba 給個面子吧

3.

Gěi gè miànzi bei 給個面子唄

The first version, which is how I would normally say it, is self-deferential and humble. With the explicit inclusion of "wǒ 我" ("me"), I'm putting myself down relative to the person to whom I am speaking.

The second version is less serious, less begging, less pleading.  "How about giving me some face, all right?"

The third version is more casual, even a bit playful, without any assumptions about whether the person you're talking to is actually expected to give you some face. "Wanna give me a little face, eh / huh?"

These three versions are all spoken in Mandarin, which does not have a particularly elaborate system of modal particles, but already we can see how important a role they play in communication between individuals.  A language like Cantonese, which has an even richer assembly of modal particles, relies on them heavily to express shades of meaning and emotion.

 

Addendum:  a note on bài / bei 唄

The character 唄 is composed of a mouth radical on the left as semantophore and a cowry shell on the right as phonophore.  The attachment of a mouth radical to a well-known character having a deep history (already on the oracle bones in the latter part of the 2nd millennium BC) indicates that the resultant character is being used for phonetic purposes, not semantic.

Cowries were used as money in ancient China (Shell money). Guo (1945) proposes that cowries used by the ancient Chinese dynasties in Central China must have come from the southeastern shores of China and areas further south, as the species of sea snail used as decoration and currency—Monetaria moneta (money cowry)—is not native to the eastern seashores of China. He further proposes that in addition to the cowry itself, the word for cowry, 貝, is also an ancient loanword from languages of the south (which call it “bia”).

Compare Malay bia (“cowry”), Thai เบี้ย (bîia, “cowry shell; money”), Proto-Mon-Khmer *ɓa(a)j (“bean, small weight or coin”) > Khasi sbâi, 'bâi (“money, cowry, shell”), Khmer ពៃ (pɨy, “obsolete small coin”).

Alternatively, Starostin, Matisoff (2003) and Schuessler (2007) relate 貝 to Proto-Sino-Tibetan *bwap (“snail”), via 貝 (OC *paːds) < *pāps. If so it would be cognate with Jingpho pawp, lapawp (“snail”).

Middle Sinitic: /pɑi^H/

Old Sinitic

(Baxter–Sagart): /*pˤa[t]-s/

(Zhengzhang): /*paːds/

Source

唄 was employed twice to indicate a sound without regard to meaning.

The first, during the early medieval period, was to transcribe the sound of the Sanskrit word pāṭha पाठ (Soothill and Hodous, 1937) as it occurs in fànbài 梵唄 (Buddhist psalmody or chanting of prayers.

The second, during the early modern period, was to transcribe a colloquial modal particle with a variety of meanings, such as suggestiveness, concession, assertion, acceptance, obviousness or grudging agreement, etc.

 

Selected readings

• "The wonder of Cantonese particles" (5/14/18)
• "Cantonese sentence-final particles" (3/23/17)
• "Cantonese intonation" (4/30/15)
• "Mandarin is weirder than Cantonese" (8/14/13)
• "Weird languages?" (7/2/13)

 

[Thanks to Diana Shuheng Zhang]