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Utterance-Final Particles In Klang Valley Malay, Tom G. Hoogervorst

Wacana, Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia

This paper examines a group of small morphemes analysed as “utterance-final particles” in the Malay variety of the Klang Valley, West Malaysia. It provides a preliminary investigation into their usage and diachronic evolution, connecting fieldwork-based findings with extant research on other Malay varieties. There is no univocal definition of utterance-final particles – known by other scholars as “discourse particles” or “pragmatic particles” – nor broad agreement on the term’s conceptual validity. Most previous research on Malay varieties approaches these units as unbound morphemes with no grammatical and little obvious lexical meaning, relegating their functionality to the realm of pragmatics. This …