Epistemic indefinites in Cantonese: a case study of m-zi ‘not-know’
Tommy Tsz-Ming Lee
August 2023 

A recent line of research (Alonso-Ovalle and Menéndez-Benito 2015, and references therein) concerns how an existential claim is bundled with a modal component — in particular, one relating to speakers’ ignorance — in the nominal domain . The primary focus of this paper is to discuss a case of epistemic indefinites in Cantonese which takes the form of m-zi-WH ‘not-know-WH’. I argue for two claims in this paper. First, I propose that mzi is an (overt) choice function opera- tor that binds wh-expressions and disjunctive expressions. Second, I suggest that the ignorance component associated with mzi is a conventional implicature, representing a new type of the ig- norance component for epistemic indefinites. I also discuss a potential grammaticalization path of m-zi, connecting its syntactic distribution to its semantic properties. The findings in this paper uncover a new breed of epistemic indefinites and contributes to our understanding of both the interpretation of wh-expressions in Cantonese and the study of how natural languages encode an ignorance component in nominal expressions.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/007491 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Resubmitted
keywords:	wh-expressions, choice function, ignorance, conventional implicature, grammaticalization, cantonese, semantics, syntax
Downloaded:	421 times

 

[ edit this article | back to article list ]