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  • Upcoming: Wh-doublets in Cantonese and their typological implications

    Wh-doublets in Cantonese and their typological implications

    Tommy Tsz-Ming Lee

    City University of Hong Kong

    CRT-9.62

    9/F, Centennial Campus Run Run Shaw Tower, The University of Hong Kong

    19 October 20:30

    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)

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

    (2)

    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.

    Tommy Tsz-Ming Lee

    City University of Hong Kong