Essays on Writing and Language in Honor - Sino-Platonic Papers

Sino-Platonic Papers, 27 (August 3 1, 199 1)
The particle "ma" in question contrasts minimally with the question
marker "ma" as in the following:
1. lai ma ? A= you coming?
2. lai ma . Do come, for my sake, etc.
(1 ) is uttered with rising intonation and shorter duration, whereas (2)
is with falling intonation and longer duration.1 This will be called ma2
henceforth.
"m2" typically occurs in casual conversation when status and feelings
are intricately entangled. Chao defines it as "dogmatic assertionW.2
Normally it occurs in an expanded context of one kind or another.
The problem
I first noticed a problem in interpreting ma2 when examining some
, ,
spoken texts from Beijing Ren for an Intermediate Chinese class. The text
that stands out was 'Biaozhun Huat (Standard Talk). Reading it I was struck
by the frequent use of the particle ma2, and my own feeling of being put
off by the way the speaker used it to patronize his listeners. When an
English translation was available, I found that the passage did not give the
same feeling. The English version gave the impression of ritualized, formal
speech, of a set way of packaging the bit of information contained in an
utterance. After examination and comparison of the two texts, it became
clear that the translator was more interested in the load of cliches which
wry little in content in the original text and not so much its emotive parts.
1 Chao, Y.R., A grammar of spoken Chinese, p.800
2 Ibid. p 801.
158
.