A semantic study of restrictive particles in Cantonese

Abstract

Cantonese has a rich inventory of restrictive focus particles across syntactic categories, including verbs, adverbs, affixes, and sentence-final particles. Specifically, the restrictive sentence-final particles have a comparatively intricate set of manifestations (cf. Fung 2000 on a comparative study of seven restrictive sentence-final particles). Intriguingly, these particles are found to be naturally co-occurring with each other, suggesting that the restrictive particle system in Cantonese presents a more complicated picture than expected. However, studies focusing on their semantics are still lacking. The objective of this dissertation is to explore the underlying semantic system of five Cantonese restrictive particles, namely zinghai, zaai, postverbal -dak, zaa3 and ze1. The current study has taken the sentence-final particles zaa3 and ze1 as the first step to investigate the semantic composition of restrictive particles. Three basic semantic components constitute the core semantics of the restrictive sentence-final particles zaa3 and ze1: (i) the denotation of the corresponding sentence without the particle; (ii) the negated existential quantification functioning as "exclusion"; (iii) scalar presupposition, which is arguably the crucial factor of explaining the distributional behavior of zaa3 and ze1 and the subtle differences in their interpretations contributed to sentences. Crucially, in contrast to the low ranking scalar presupposition of zaa3, ze1 encodes a high-to-low ranking scalar presuppostion. Having established a semantic framework for restrictive particles based on the examination of zaa3 and ze1, the analysis is extended to postverbal -dak, zinghai, and zaai. Due to the selectional restriction on the associated item, namely, that it must be a quantized nominal, the basic semantics of -dak is comprised of the first two: (i) the denotation of the corresponding sentence without the particle; (ii) the negated existential quantification. The absence of scalar presupposition in constituting the core meaning of -dak has led to an important assumption that it is a scalar particle. On the other hand, despite the absence of such a selectional restriction on zinghai, it shares the same set of semantic components with postverbal -dak. In this respect, zaai is analyzed on a par with zinghai and postverbal -dak, due to its status of being a non-scalar restrictive particle. Along with the above lines of thoughts, the current study sheds some light on a landscape capturing the class of Cantonese restrictive markers on the basis of their distributional patterns on two semantic properties, namely scalarity and scale selection. The two properties that help distinguish between the particles ultimately introduce five types of restrictive particles, each of which is represented by the corresponding manifestation: (i) zaai can only interact with non-scalar contexts, hence belongs to [-scalar] type; (ii) -dak can only interact with scalar contexts along a semantic scale, hence characterized as [+scalar] and [-flexible-scale] type; (iii) ze1 can interact with scalar contexts along a semantic scale or a pragmatic scale, hence belonging to [+scalar] and [+flexible-scale] type; (iv) zinghai can interact with a non-scalar context, or a scalar context only along a semantic scale, hence residing in [±scalar] and [-flexible-scale] type; (v) zaa3 can interact with a non-scalar context, or a scalar context along a semantic or pragmatic scale, hence characterized as [±scalar] and [+flexible-scale] type. On the basis of the above classification, the interplay of these semantic properties and the scope relation in the co-occurrence of the particles is examined, with a special reference to an additional restrictive particle, namely preverbal dak. The hierarchical ordering of the particles, namely, that restrictive particles that are closer to the associated item in terms of hierarchical structure have priority to associate with the item, helps predict the interaction of the particles within a sentence. The relation between the syntactic scope and the semantic properties of the particles would lend support to a speculation that the associated items at each syntactic level have a typical restrictive particle and zaa3 is the most flexible among these particles. Having built up a more comprehensive picture with respect to the semantic properties displayed by the particles and their division of labor within the same sentence, it is hoped that the semantic analysis developed in this thesis can provide a basis for studies on other restrictive particles cross-linguistically, as well as other quantifiers such as additive particles in Cantonese in future research.

Date of Award	3 Oct 2014
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Po Lun Peppina LEE (Supervisor) & Haihua PAN (Co-supervisor)