Epistemic Indefinites and Reportative Indefinites in Cantonese

Epistemic Indefinites and Reportative Indefinites in Cantonese Tommy Tsz-Ming Lee University of Southern California tszmingl@usc.edu Hok-Yuen Wong The Chinese University of Hong Kong wonghyo@cuhk.edu.hk Abstract This paper examines the syntactic and semantic properties of the two understudied uses of wh-expressions in Cantonese, in the form of m-zi-wh ‘not-know-wh’ and wh-wh (wh-doublets). We argue that they are, respectively, Epistemic Indefinites (EIs) and Reportative Indefinites (RIs). We suggest that the speaker’s ignorance associated with EIs and reportative implication associated with RIs, are conventional implicatures. Building on their distributional similarities, we propose a unified syntactic and semantic analysis for both EIs and RIs in Cantonese. 1. Introduction The interpretation of wh-expressions in Cantonese varies with environments, largely patterning with Mandarin (Chierchia and Liao, 2015, i.a.). (1) Interrogative Aaming sik-zo matje Aaming eat-PERF what ‘What did Aaming eat?’ (2) Negative (Lee 2014) Aaming mou sik matje Aaming not eat what ‘Aaming didn’t eat anything.’ / ‘Aaming ate only a few things.’ (3) Universal Aaming matje dou sik Aaming what all eat ‘Aaming eats everything.’ A complication lies in the existential use of Cantonese wh-expressions, which cannot be used in exactly the same way as Mandarin ones. (4) Existential a. *Aaming houci sik-zo matje [C] Aaming seem eat-PERF what Int.: ‘Aaming seems to have eaten something.’ b. Aming haoxiang chi-le shenme [M] Aming seem eat-PERF what Instead of bare wh-expressions, Cantonese adopts a numeral expression (i.e. (one)-CL NP) to express (4a). (5) Aaming houci sik-zo (jat) joeng je Aaming seem eat-PERF one kind thing It is, however, premature to conclude that wh- expressions in Cantonese cannot be used existentially in any case. Truth-conditionally, both (6) and (7) entail (5). (6) Wh-expressions in m-zi-wh sequence Aaming houci sik-zo m-zi matje Aaming seem eat-PERF M-ZI what ‘Aaming seems to have eaten somethingu.’1 (7) Wh-expressions in the form of wh-doublets Aaming houci sik-zo matje-matje Aaming seem eat-PERF what-what ‘Aaming seems to have eaten somethingm.’ However, these uses convey something more than a canonical indefinite expression. For example, (6) conveys the speaker’s ignorance on what Aaming seems to have eaten, while (7) suggests that the thing that Aaming seems to have eaten is previously mentioned to the speaker. The goal of this paper is to examine the syntax and semantics of these uses of wh-expressions in (6) and (7). We first argue that the wh-expression in (6) is used as an Epistemic Indefinite (hereafter EI; in the sense of Alonso-Ovalle and Menéndez- Benito (2015)), whereas the wh-expression in (7) as a Reportative Indefinite (hereafter RI; cf. Quotational Indefinite discussed in Koev (2017)), respectively (§2.1 & §2.2). We further argue that the “additional meaning” associated with EIs and RIs are conventional implicatures (Potts 2005) (§2.3). In §3, we reveal three various distributional similarities of EIs and RIs. We give 1 The subscripts u and m in the translation lines stand for ‘unknown to the speaker’ and ‘mentioned to the speaker previously’ respectively. PACLIC 32 339 32nd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation Hong Kong, 1-3 December 2018 Copyright …

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