Language, Action and Thought

The aim of this presentation is to describe the levels of meaning of Burmese response particles of acceptance. The discourse particles under analysis are ei, in and their derived forms. These particles are frequent in the spoken language. In the presentation, I will talk about the semantic meaning of these particles, and the factors that influence their use and interpretation. I will defend the following ideas: The Burmese particles under study mainly have a modal function. These particles show different types of non-modal meanings: expressive meanings, epistemic meanings and gender meanings. These particles have strong contextual constraints of use related to the Burmeses politeness system. These particles can be combined with intonation, contextual evaluation of the social situation, and facial expression to convey different expressive attitudes of the speaker. The reduplicated form of one of these particles reinforces the meaning of the simple particle and forms a scale with the simple form. These particles do not combine with other expressions to construct a propositional representation. Moreover, these particles, unlike their quasi-equivalent forms in other languages, like Spanish bueno, Basque tira or French bon, have no phatic or metadiscoursive functions.