2416: Particles Aug 2, 2021

In grammatical terms, a particle is a function word associated with word without any lexical meaning of its own. These would include terms like 'not', 'oh', and 'to' (as a marker for infinitives) since these are integral for overall meaning and syntactic structure, but cannot be defined independently. In this way they are considered to be in their own lexical class, though in older definitions a particle was just anything that could not be inflected and could be part of other lexical classes like articles, conjunctions, prepositions, and even adverbs. Since particles indicate grammatical relation between words, language with lots of inflection tend to have fewer, and languages with little to no inflection, like Mandarin, will use particles instead of things like affixes to indicate grammatical functions.