study of small words

[liuyuanpin]

I am writing my MA on small words, where can i find some relevant articles? Thanks

[laohong]

What do you mean by "small words"? Do you mean "particles" (小品词)?

[xiaoz]

Search for "small words" at this site, see what you will get -

http://www.corpus4u.com/forum_view.asp?view_id=1103&forum_id=11
http://www.corpus4u.com/forum_view.asp?view_id=743&forum_id=11

Are you studying small words in Chinese? If not, why is this posting in this section?

[xujiajin]

“Small words” is an awkward and last minute terminology coined by He Anping.

[laohong]

Thanks Jiajin and Richard. Excuse for my ignorance, just had a quick read of He Anping's article "中国大学生英语口语 Small Words 的研究" (follow Xiaoz's post above to find it). I'm kind of against their use of "small words" to refer to "discourse markers", which is a more accepted term to many of us. As the article acknowledged, she followed Hasselgren's terminology (Hasselgren , A. 1998. Small words and Valid Testing . Unpublished PhD thesis , Bergen University , Norway.), but I still could not find convincing enough reasons why they decided to abandon the commonly used term. To make it worse, the term of "small words" is quite misleading, especially so to Chinese students.

[xujiajin]

Thank laohong for providing the source of the source.
There is a considerable terminological confusion in the field of discourse marker studies, and this might be one of the reasons why He Anping decided to use this "particle" term as her terminology.

Discourse marker revisited
http://www.corpus4u.com/forum_view.asp?view_id=802&forum_id=51

[laohong]

You have posted a comprehensive list of studies on discourse markers. I'll read them later. Thanks again for the pointer.