Semantics and Pragmatics of Cantonese Polar Questions: an inquisitive approach

PACLIC 28 !605 Semantics and Pragmatics of Cantonese Polar Questions: an inquisitive approach Yurie Hara Department of Linguistics and Translation, City University of Hong Kong 83 Tat Chee Avenue Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR y.hara@cityu.edu.hk Abstract This paper analyzes four kinds of Cantonese polar questions, HO2, ME1, AA4 and A-NOT- A questions in the framework of radical in- quisitive semantics (Groenendijk & Roelof- sen, 2010; Aher, 2012; Sano, 2014). HO2, ME1 and A-NOT-A questions have multi- dimensional semantics. In addition to their primary speech act of questioning, HO2 and ME1 interrogatives encode secondary as- sertive acts of positive and negative expecta- tions, respectively, while A-NOT-A interroga- tives conventionally encode lack of expecta- tion, hence the neutral requirement. In con- trast, AA4 interrogatives are semantically sim- plex question acts, thus they can be used in both biased and neutral contexts. 1 Introduction Cantonese has a number of constructions that ex- press a polar question as in (1) and (2). Examples in (1) are taken from Lam (2014b,a). All of them encode a polar question meaning but they also dif- fer in terms of the context’s bias/neutrality. (1-a), a so-called A-NOT-A question, can only be asked in a neutral context. (1-b) with a sentence-final particle HO2 is used when the speaker is biased toward the positive answer, while (1-c) with ME1 is asked when the speaker has a bias toward the negative answer.1 1The numbers in Cantonese example sentences indicate lex- ical tones: 1 = high-level; 2 = medium rising; 3 = medium level; 4 = low falling; 5 = low rising; 6 = low level. (1) a. zi3ming4 Jimmy jau5 have mou5 not.have fu6ceot1 devote gwo3 ASP si4gaan3 time aa3? PRT ‘Has Jimmy spent time (on the project), or not?’ (A-NOT-A Q) b. zi3ming4 Jimmy jau5 have fu6ceot1 devote gwo3 ASP si4gaan3 time gaa3 PRT ho2? HO2 ‘Jimmy has spent time (on the project), hasn’t he?’ (HO2 Q) c. zi3ming4 Jimmy jau5 have fu6ceot1 devote gwo3 ASP si4gaan3 time me1? ME ‘Jimmy hasn’t spent time (on the project), has he?’ (ME1 Q) In contrast, an AA4 question like (2), which is simply marked with a final question particle AA4 is not as restricted. It can be used in both neutral and biased contexts.2 (2) zi3ming4 Jimmy jau5 have fu6ceot1 devote gwo3 ASP si4gaan3 time aa4? AA4 ‘Has Jimmy spent time (on the project)?’ (aa4 Q) The goal of this paper is to provide a seman- tic analysis that derives each interpretation. Lam 2There is also MAA3 particle, which is borrowed from Man- darin and somehow more formal (Matthews & Yip, 1994). Copyright 2014 by Yurie Hara 28th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation pages 605–614 PACLIC 28 !606 (2014a) argues that HO2 and ME1 questions are complex speech acts of questioning and asserting, while A-NOT-A questions are simple acts of ques- tioning. Lam’s (2014a) account of A-NOT-A ques- tions fails to explain why they are more restricted than AA4 questions, which can be used in both bi- ased and neutral …

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