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This thesis is a corpus-based attempt to investigate the four uses of gam2 in Taiwanese Hakka, i.e., the modal use, the rhetorical/refuting use, the conjecture use, and the interrogative use. It is found that syntax alone may not be sufficient to distinguish the four uses in that, except for the modal use, all the other three uses may occur in the same syntactic environments. The three uses are, in fact, context-dependent and closely-related to speaker’s supposition. When a speaker supposes that the situation is contrary to what is on his/her mind, the refuting use is adopted. When a speaker believes that the situation is the same as what s/he expects, the conjecture use is used. Different from the previous two uses, the interrogative use is neutral in speaker’s expectation. The chi-square statistic shows that the distribution of the four uses in the spoken and written corpora is non-significant. Note, however, that, except for the refuting-conjecture pair, all the other pairs of the four uses are statistically significant. Based on frequency of occurrence, semantic complexity, inter-linguistic distance, and pragmatic functions, we suggest the following pedagogical sequencing: the modal use > the interrogative use > the conjecture use > the refuting use. This sequencing is, nonetheless, different from the diachronic development of gam2 from the modal use to the interrogative use, through the refuting use and the conjecture use.
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