Abstract
This chapter presents evidence that strongly indicates six Cantonese sentence-final particles (SFPs) have English intonational equivalents. These six SFPs divide into three pairs of related particles: the evidential particles lo1 and aa1maa3; the question particles me1 and aa4; and the “only” particles zaa3 and ze1. Each SFP’s meaning is described, and a Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) definition of it is presented before showing and discussing the data related to its English equivalent. The data comprise Cantonese-to-English oral translations and their accompanying F0 contours. The translators were ambilingual speakers of L1 Cantonese and L1 English. Based on the fact that each SFP translated into English as the same form of intonation by more than one ambilingual translator in more than one context, it is assumed that the definition given to each SFP also applies to its English intonational equivalent. It is further proposed that these English forms of intonation are tonal morphemes that reside in native-English speakers’ lexicons.
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Notes
- 1.
Versions of the study on lo1 and aa1maa3 discussed in Sect. 6.1 are also published in Wakefield (2010, 2012a); versions of the study on me1 and aa4 discussed in Sect. 6.2 are also published in Wakefield (2010, 2014); and a version of the study on ze1 and zaa3 discussed in Sect. 6.3 will be published in Wakefield (in press).
- 2.
A predicate appears between mai6 and lo1, which in (1) is wan2 dai6ji6 fan6 gung1 (“find another job”).
- 3.
- 4.
Section 5.2.3 explains why the translations are referred to as mimic translations.
- 5.
The native English speakers included 5 speakers of Standard American English, 3 speakers of Standard Australian English, and 2 native English speakers who were born and raised in Hong Kong.
- 6.
Readers should recall P2 is a belief or stance that the speaker assumes the listener does not hold, and therefore P2 cannot be “S/he’s still young,” because the listener clearly knows and believes this.
- 7.
The father could use lo1 attachment in a joking manner but would need to immediately restate the mother’s question addressing himself: “Yeah , [PA]. Why did I say she’s getting fat?” The proposition P is still “that’s a good question,” and this is in fact a conceivable tactic that a quick-thinking father could use in an attempt to retract his or her initial statement.
- 8.
It is interesting and informative to compare this NSM explication with the one that Wong (2004: 782) proposed for the Singapore English particle meh:
a. at a time before now, I thought something
b. something happened now
c. because of this,
d. I think I can’t think like this anymore
e. I think I have to think like this (P)
f. I don’t know
g. I want to know
h. because of this, I want you to say something about it to me now
Wong’s explication for meh is notably similar to my explication of me1. This is not surprising since it has been proposed that meh was borrowed from Cantonese “as a package,” including its form, tone and meaning (Lim 2007: 463). I argue that my explication in (41) better captures the meaning of me1 than does Wong’s (2004) explication for meh, but this could of course be because the two particles do not have precisely the same meaning.
The key difference between the two explications relates to the stance change of the speaker. Wong’s lines d. and e. indicate that meh expresses that the speaker has changed his or her stance from thinking something different from P to now thinking P. This contrasts with my line (42a) that indicates me1 expresses that the speaker maybe, but not necessarily, now thinks P. Wong’s explication, in essence, articulates a stance change from “I thought X before” to “now I can’t think X; I must think Y.” My explication, on the contrary, expresses a stance change related to a single proposition, going from “I thought not X before” to “now I think maybe X.
- 9.
- 10.
My own conclusions based on my research differ from Gunlogson’s (2003). I agree that (57a) and (57b) are syntactically distinct clause types, one being an interrogative and the other a declarative. However, this is not their only difference; (57b) additionally includes a tonal morpheme that is absent from (57a).
- 11.
There are also nonrising interrogatives that pattern differently from rising interrogatives, but Gunlogson (2003) purposely left those out of her minimal-pair contrasts.
- 12.
Of course, a context could be constructed so that this question implies an excessive amount. For example if the speaker asks it right after the listener says he or she bought a new Porsche.
- 13.
Leung (2016), who also proposed an NSM explication of zaa3, did not conclude, as most authors have, that zaa3 is a neutral expression of the meaning “only,” and she added this additional line to her definition: “someone can feel something because of this.” I do not agree that zaa3 expresses this, but interested readers can refer to Leung (2016, Chap. 7) to see her explanation.
The first line of Leung’s explication for zaa3 also did not include “much/many” and added the meaning of similarity using “like,” resulting in: “it is like this, (it is) not more.” While this can refer to a state or an event, it does not seem that this accurately refers to an amount, such as the “ten dollars” of the example in (65). In contrast, wording it as I have in (66) and (67) (i.e., “it is this much/many, (it is) not more”) can refer to an amount, or to a state or event. For example, if a boy was explaining to a jealous girlfriend that he was only chatting with that girl she saw him with, nothing more, then he could attach zaa3 or ze1 to a statement such as “Ngo5dei6 king1gai2 ge3 zaa3/ze1” (“We were (only) chatting”), and it could be followed by “Hai6 gam3 do1” (“Nothing more (than that)”). This indicates that the activity “chatting,” which is an event, can be thought of in terms of an amount, i.e., not more serious than this. Or it could also be interpreted with an exclusive reading, where conversing is an event with more than one possible interpretation: chatting, flirting, dating, courting, etc. And here zaa3/ze1 are used to express that the event of these two people talking had only one of those possible meanings or interpretations, i.e., “chatting.”
- 14.
I thank the anonymous reviewer who provided this example.
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Wakefield, J.C. (2020). The Results of the Research. In: Intonational Morphology. Prosody, Phonology and Phonetics. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2265-9_6
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