Sentence-Final Particle de in Mandarin as an Informativity Maximizer

In this study, we provide a new empirical generalization of the meaning contribution of the Mandarin sentence-final particle de from an information maximizer perspective. Based on the cross-entropy model, we quantify the informativity associated with the prejacent that de attaches to. We further 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 in general.