| Summary: |
This paper scrutinizes the claim that modern Shanghainese has a sentence-final particle tse that has a tense-marking function. We review works by Nairong Qian (2006; 2009), Yuen Ren Chao (1926), and Li et al. (1982) and analyse Shanghainese missionary texts on the use of tse. Through a functional-discoursal investigation, we identify the IN-cluster use and the END-cluster use of tse. We take the temporal marking function of tse as a consequence of its discourse function, which introduces a current reference time in
the discourse |
