Modal Particle

In linguistics, modal particles are always uninflected words, and are a type of grammatical particle. Their function is that of reflecting the mood or attitude of the speaker or narrator, in that they are not reflexive but change the mood of the verb. They are often used to indicate how the speaker thinks that the content of the sentence relates to the participants' common knowledge. Languages that use a lot of modal particles in their spoken form include Dutch, German, Indonesian and Japanese. The translation is often not straightforward and depends on the context.

Mandarin Chinese depends highly on the use of modal particles. Because it is a tonal language, expressing emotion by changing the pitch of the sentence or phrase would make the meaning of the sentence different; therefore, many particles have arisen that can be added to the end of the sentence to express emotion.