172 CHAPTER 4. PARTICLES
In addition to its roles as noun lister and referral particle, can be
used as a question softener. Used on its own this is considered reserved
speech, bordering on effeminate, and men tend to use instead.
”What happened?”For answers to questions that ask for a reason to some situation,
softens this reason:
A:
B:A: ”Why are you still at work?”
B: ”(it is because) I’m not done with my work yet.”Again, this use is considered borderline effeminate, so men tend
to use this construction in conjunction with the plain copula , with or
without contracting the to an to form or. The polite version,
, will be treated in the section on more particles later in this chapter.
- Disambiguity
As already explained in chapter 2, in the verb particle section, (pro-
nounced ) is used to disambiguate statements. Let’s look at what this
means in terms of what does, compared to or. Imagine that we’re
having a conversation and we’re talking about watching films in the cin-
ema, DVD rentals, and TV shows, and the following sentence is used:
(...)Where for (...) we either find , or. While all three would
translate to ”(I) watch TV a lot”, their connotations are very different.
1)When we use , the sentence is fairly plain information. Whoever
of us says it wants to convey that they watch TV a lot, and nothing more.
2)When we use , the sentence is still plain information, although
using rather than emphasises that whoever is talking about TV, is