Sentence-final particle 'de' in Mandarin as an informativity maximizer

Abstract

We propose that the Mandarin sentence-final particle de is attached to answers with maximal utility. We quantify this utility as informativity by drawing on a cross-entropy model, and explore the plausibility of applying cross-entropy methods (as well as related Kullback- Leibler divergence-based methods) across languages, as a precise model of understanding the subtle pragmatic meanings of sentence-final particles.