A Study of Evidential Particles in Cantonese: the case of wo3 wo5 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Evidentiality and epistemic modality in Zhuang
This paper discusses evidentiality and epistemic modality in Zhuang, a Tai language spoken in South China's Guangxi Province and surrounding regions. A set of verbs of SPEAKING are found in Zhuang that describe the sources of information. These typically involve the grammaticalised marker nau⁴ which derives from a lexical verb meaning 'say' , forming a rich array of expressions to mark direct and indirect speech, hearsay and other types of reported information , which carry a wide variety of evidential and epistemic overtones such as surprise, self-correction, mirativity, uncertainty, among others. A number of sentence-final particles, along with hedges and sensory verbs, are also found with these functions. Each of these conveys different degrees of reliability of the source of information.
This study aims at establishing a new evidential category of interpersonal evidentiality (IE). IE grounds the illocutionary force of a statement in intersubjective knowledge shared by the speaker and other assumed members of society, regardless of whatever the source of information is. Drawing on Nuyts's (1992, 2001a,b) work on the evidential application of the notion of intersubjectivity this paper argues that the perfect V-过 guo evolved in Modern Mandarin into a new IE construction. I provided a qualitative survey on 862 occurrences from the LCMC (Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese) proving the specific interpersonal dimension of V-过 guo as an evidential marker. I demonstrate in this work that IE can be seen as a proper typological category characterized by specifically grammaticalized items in many languages of the world. The theoretical implications of the establishment of IE as a typologically attested domain must lead us to redefine the primary semantics of evidentiality. The secondary claim of this work is thus to reconsider evidentiality as a non-modal domain primarily marking different types of 'acquired knowledge' rather than a 'particular source of information'. Evidential constructions encoding specific sources of evidence must then be considered as a sub-class of the broader semantic scope of 'acquired knowledge' (AK). In essence, AK is here regarded as the primary pragmatic and semantic connotation of any type of evidential construction or strategy.
On the development of Korean SAY evidentials and their extended pragmatic functions
Diachronica, 2014
This paper examines the development of five hearsay evidential markers in Korean, namely, tako, tamye, tamyense, tanun and tanta, and traces their extended pragmatic functions in discourse. We first identify their functions over time, from Middle Korean to Modern and Contemporary Korean, then quantitatively analyze the usage frequency of these functions, diachronically from the 16th century to the early 20th century using the UNICONC historical corpus, and synchronically in present-day Korean using the Sejong contemporary written and spoken corpus. From a pragmatic perspective, we examine how Korean speakers use these hearsay evidential markers to convey the interpersonal and intersubjective stances of interlocutors in natural conversations. Based on the differential rates of grammaticalization of these markers, and on their usage frequency, we also examine the relationship between evidentiality marking and finiteness; more specifically, we analyze the sequences and mechanisms of change whereby different types of non-finite evidential structures develop into finite evidential constructions. Our findings have broader theoretical and crosslinguistic implications for understanding the mechanisms of insubordination, whereby dependent structures become independent, and whereby lexically transparent constructions develop into grammaticalized markers of speakers' stance. and this paper is an expanded, revised version. We wish to thank the participants at this conference for stimulating discussions that have further shaped our understanding of the nature of evidentiality. We also wish to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers and the following scholars for their invaluable comments:
Epistemic, evidential and attitudinal markers in clause-medial position in Cantonese
Studies in Language Companion Series, 2014
This paper examines two types of clause-medial stance markers in Cantonese. 1 We trace the evolution of these stance markers from their lexical origins as complement-taking psych verbs and directional verbs. Similar to English I think parentheticals, the evolution of the Cantonese psych verbs (e.g. gok 3 dak 1 'feel/think'; paa 3 'fear'; m 4 zi 1 'don't know') involves 'insubordination' of the embedded complement clause. However, in Cantonese, subject ellipsis and topic constructions play an important role in the reanalysis of psych verbs into epistemic and negative attitudinal markers in clause-medial position. 2 Directional verbs in Cantonese (e.g. faan 1 'return' and maai 4 'approach'), on the other hand, develop into attitudinal particles via verbal complementation and a disjunctive strategy. Central to the development of both types of stance markers is the first person subject ngo 5 , whether explicitly or implicitly expressed, which makes the process of subjectification possible. 1 We at times use the term 'utterance-medial position' instead of 'clause-medial position' in this paper. This is because, in the course of grammaticalization of some Cantonese stance markers, their position is sometimes ambiguous between clause-initial and clause-medial. As will be shown in our discussion of stance markers derived from complement-taking verbs in section 2, this is often related to the presence of NPs whose syntactic status is ambiguous between a topic and subject. 2 The term 'reanalysis' is often used in grammaticalization theory to refer to shifts in readings arising from ambiguous contexts, while the term 'reinterpretation' is often used to refer to recategorization of functions and is often discussed in relation to polysemy rather than ambiguity. In this paper, we do not always make a strict, clear-cut distinction between these two terms given that both mechanisms are at work, often multiple times, in the grammaticalization of the 'say' construction from complementtaking predicate to quotative, evidential and other pragmatic uses. We wish to thank Elisabeth Leiss for valuable discussion on terminology here.
2017
Languages provide expressions that allow its users to indicate their source of information for a given claim, which can have an effect of attenuating how committed they appear to be to the truth of their claims (e.g., ame-ga futteiru-sooda 'It is raining, I hear'). This linguistic notion has been termed evidentiality, and Japanese has a rich set of morphosyntactic evidentials that express indirect evidentiality (i.e.-rashii,-sooda, and-yooda) for situations where the speaker only had access to indirect means of arriving at her claim, such as conjecture or hearsay. This dissertation presents a systematic investigation of how features of the context (i.e. the preceding sentences) can affect the interpretation and acceptability of evidential statements, and how this varies with the type of evidential. Study 1 examined the factors of (a) Sensory Information (whether sensory information for a given claim was available to the speaker), and (b) Speaker Conjecture (whether the speaker arrived at her claim via conjecture). Although there was some variability within the Japanese evidentials on how significant these factors were in terms of predicting felicity, there was a notable divide between a reportative evidential statement (exemplified above) and a matrixclause hearsay one (e.g. ame-ga futteiru-to kiita 'I heard that it is raining'). This result prompted Study 2, which examined the factors of (a) Evidence Strength / Source Reliability
2016 Evidentiality, inferentiality, and speaker's attitude -- Questionnaire or exemplary set
In many, if not all, Tibetic languages, the 'evidential' system is highly flexible. While we have a fairly good knowledge about the more common distribution of the various ‘evidential’ auxiliaries in the Tibetic languages, we have little knowledge about the more special usages that may deviate from, or even contradict, the ‘system’ derived from the com-mon usages. This questionnaire is thus an attempt to collect all special usages or the contexts that may give rise to it. This may serve to establish the different cut-off points in the different languages and dialects. This questionnaire has been developed primarily for the Tibetic languages, and is, in its initial stage, biased towards the Ladakhi dialects. In order to make it more universally applicable to Tibetic-type systems I should greatly welcome input from researchers around the world. The questionnaire will present the contexts in which the standard and non-standard usages of the ‘evidential’ and evaluative auxiliaries and morphemes in question show up.
Evidentiality and the expression of speaker’s stance in Romance languages and German
Discourse Studies
In recent years, the category of evidentiality has also come into use for the description of Romance languages and of German. This has been contingent on a change in its interpretation from a typological category to a semantic-pragmatic category, which allows an application to languages lacking specialised morphemes for the expression of evidentiality. We consider evidentiality to be a structural dimension of grammar, the values of which are expressed by types of constructions that code the source of information which a speaker imparts. If we look at the situation in Romance languages and in German, drawing a boundary between epistemic modality and evidentiality presents problems that are difficult to solve. Adding markers of the source of the speaker’s knowledge often limits the degree of responsibility of the speaker for the content of the utterance. Evidential adverbs are a frequently used means of marking the source of the speaker’s knowledge. The evidential meaning is generalis...
This paper aims at analyzing the peculiar morphology and semantics of the Korean inferential evidential expression, like ca-na-po-ta ‘(he) seems to be sleeping’ in an integrated manner, with a claim that it contains a self-addressed interrogative morpheme. From a diachronic perspective, the paper proposes that the emergence of the inferential marker is bias-driven, arguing that an inherent bias in self-addressed question constitutes a necessary condition for the later development. And the bias, which is undoubtedly of an epistemic nature, is reinterpreted as inferential evidentiality with the addition of the previously perceptual morpheme –po-. On a synchronic side, capitalizing on the fact that –kka is another self-addressed interrogative morpheme alongside with –na and –ka, the present work claims that this morpheme can also make an inferential evidential marker, i.e., -kka-po-, which is always preceded by a prospective morpheme –l-. It is demonstrated that apparent semantic differences between the kka-variant and the other two variants is better understood as a sortal contrast, since the predictive future is the converse of the inferential past (Nichols 1986).
A Study of the Cantonese Hearsay Particle wo from a Tonal Perspective
International Journal of Linguistics, 2009
Cantonese is a tone language very rich in sentence-final particles which express moods and attitudes. Some of them are identical in phonetic segments but different in lexical tones. This paper discusses a pair of such SFPs in Cantonese, wo3 and wo5, the former has been in use for a long time and its function has altered from indicating hearsay to unexpectedness and noteworthiness, while the latter is not found in the earlier literature and its only function is to express hearsay information. By reviewing the development of Chinese phonology and present-day Cantonese phonology, hypotheses are proposed in this paper to explain the reason why the tone of the hearsay wo would be tone 5 instead of the other tones when there are six contrastive lexical tones in Hong Kong Cantonese.