Wh-doublets in Cantonese and their typological implications
Tommy Tsz-Ming Lee
City 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.
| 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.’
| 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.
Tommy Tsz-Ming Lee
City University of Hong Kong
tszmlee@cityu.edu.hk