Wh-doublets in Cantonese and their typological implications

This talk discusses wh-doublets in Cantonese, where a wh-expression is used in reduplicated forms and shows substantial differences from its singlet counterparts. While wh-doublets are attested in an array of languages, such as Korean, Japanese, Yaeyaman, Mongolian, Tagalog and Turkish, they show non-trivial cross-linguistic variations. Drawing on examples like (1) and (2), we report two signature properties of wh-doublets in Cantonese. First, Cantonese allows non-bare wh-doublets, a typologically rare type of wh-doublets, where reduplication may target a phrase containing a wh-expression (as in (2)), in addition to just the wh-expression (as in (1)). Second, both types of wh-doublets instantiate a special type of indefinites which come with an evidential implicature, signaling the speakers’ access to the source of evidence of the indefinites.

(1)

阿明	話	佢	喺	自助餐	食-咗
Aaming	waa	keoi	hai	zizocaan	sik-zo
Aaming	say	he	at	buffet	eat-PFV

[乜嘢乜嘢]	喎。
[matje-matje]	wo
what-what	SFP

Lit.: ‘(I heard) Aaming said he ate what-what at the buffet.’

(2)

阿明	話	佢	喺	自助餐	[ 食-咗	乜嘢
Aaming	waa	keoi	hai	zizocaan	[ sik-zo	matje
Aaming	say	he	at	buffet	[ eat-PFV	what

食-咗	乜嘢 ]	喎。
sik-zo	matje ]	wo
eat-PFV	what ]	SFP

Lit.: ‘(I heard) Aaming said he ate-what ate-what at the buffet.’

We motivate a non-uniform syntactic analysis of two types of wh-doublets, where bare wh-doublets involve phonological reduplication, and non-bare ones involve syntactic reduplication. The distinction is supported by the morpho-syntactic properties and their difference in semantic number. Furthermore, we differentiate Cantonese wh-doublets from their counterparts in Japanese, German, and Bulgarian, which have been argued to involve metalinguistic quantification or a quotative implicature. We propose a more general evidential characterization of wh-doublets in Cantonese, which sheds light on recent studies on indefinites that carry additional implicatures, e.g., epistemic indefinites.