A follow-up from a previous blog– there is another very important tone conditioned dialectal correspondence between Cantonese and Mandarin, namely the sentence-final particle 啦 -lah, which can be pronounced either as tone 1 (5-5) or tone 3 (3-3). If you recall, in a previous blog I used the sentence-final particle啦 which I labelled ‘exhortative’:
咁 你 就 嚟 啦
gam nei jau lei lah
and.so you then come EXHORTATIVE.PARTICLE
‘If so, you should come.’
This use of 啦 -lah is pronounced as tone 1 (5-5) and it expresses encouragement/polite commands (e.g. ‘you should come/please come’). This use of 啦 is equivalent to Mandarin 吧 -ba:
那麼 你 就 來 吧
name ni jiu lai ba
and.so you then come EXHORTATIVE.PARTICLE
‘If so, you should come.’
However, those of you who possess eagle eyes may have noticed that in another blog I argued that Cantonese 啦 -lah was equivalent to Mandarin 了 -le, which as a sentence-final particle expresses declarations:
我 要 走 啦
ngoh yiu jau lah
I have.to go DECLARATIVE.PARTICLE
我 要 走 了
wo yao zou le
I have.to go DECLARATIVE.PARTICLE
‘I have to go.’
It looks confusing, the fact that Cantonese 啦 -lah seems to express two different meanings (declarative vs exhorative). However, the latter use of 啦 -lah (declarative) is pronounced with tone 3 (3-3) and as such it is a declarative particle which simply reinforces the force of the affirmation i.e. ‘I have to go’. The polysemy of Cantonese 啦 -lah (exhorative/declarative) is therefore disambiguated by its tonal alternations, which, as in all tonal languages, play an important part in the lexical entries of lexical items.