A floating tone discourse morpheme: The English equivalent of Cantonese lo1 (original) (raw)

Cantonese linguists have said that Cantonese sentence-final particles (SFPs) express the same kinds of meanings that are expressed by intonation in languages such as English, yet apparently no study has ever systematically attempted to discover whether any SFPs have English intonational equivalents. This study identifies the English intonational counterpart to the SFP lo1 by looking at the pitch contours of Cantonese-to-English audio translations, which were provided by four Cantonese/English native bilingual participants. Based on the data, it is concluded that the English equivalent of lo1 is a high-falling pitch contour. A definition using the natural semantic metalanguage is formulated to define lo1, and native English-speaker judgments indicate that this same definition also defines the meaning of lo1's English equivalent. Examples are given to demonstrate that this definition succeeds at defining either lo1 or its English equivalent in any context within which they are used. It is proposed that this lo1-equivalent pitch contour is a floating tone morpheme in the English lexicon. Linguists have long debated whether or not any forms of intonation have context-independent meanings. This study offers empirical evidence in support of the argument that they do. Keywords: Cantonese; discourse particle; floating tone; evidential marker; discourse intonation; natural semantic metalanguage metalanguage (NSM), and native English-speaker judgments are collected as a form of evidence to show that lo1 and its English equivalent have the same meaning. It is taken as a working hypothesis that lo1 and its English counterpart are equivalents with regard to function, meaning, and grammatical category, i.e., that they are both discourse particles that function to link the sentence to the discourse in the same way. This paper is organized as follows. The next section describes the forms and functions of intonation and SFPs, and explains the three-way relationship among intonation, lexical tones and SFPs. Section 3 introduces the natural semantic metalanguage and proposes an NSM definition for lo1. Section 4 describes the research design and methodology. Then, based on the Cantonese-to-English translations, section 5 describes the form of lo1's English equivalent. Section 6 demonstrates that the NSM definition is able to accurately describe the uses of lo1 and it English equivalent in any context where they appear. Section 7 explains the polysemy of lo1 and the final section provides a summary and conclusion of the study. Throughout the paper, the term SFP refers to Cantonese SFPs. 2. Intonation and discourse particles Cheung (1986:251) said it is "beyond doubt" that lexical tones, SFPs, and intonation are interrelated because lexical tones and intonation both share the same form, while SFPs and 4 intonation share the same functions. To help readers better understand this three-way relationship among SFPs, intonation and lexical tones, this section first describes the forms of intonation and lexical tones, and then the forms of discourse particles. After that the overlapping functions of SFPs and intonation are described in order to explain why the complex lexical tone system of Cantonese has resulted in its using segmental particles to express the types of meanings that are expressed by intonation in English. 2.1. The forms of intonation and lexical tones Intonational forms consist of pitch, length and loudness. Pitch is considered by linguists to be the most important of the three, followed by length and then loudness (Chun, 2002;