Clause-medial particles and stance-marking in Cantonese

Abstract

Speakers have various linguistic resources at their disposal to express their stance, e.g. their feelings, viewpoints, evaluations and attitude. It is well known that Cantonese has a rich inventory of sentence final particles to express speaker stance (see Cheung 1972; Kwok 1984; Law 1990; Matthews & Yip 1994; Fung 2000; Leung 2005; Sybesma & Li 2007; inter alia). More recently, attention has also been given to clause-medial particles in Cantonese as well. For example, Chor (2010; 2013) recently examined the development of post-predicate directional particles faan and maai into markers of the speaker’s positive and negative attitude respectively. Wong, Yang & Yap (2011) and Yap & Chor (2014) have also recently examined the reanalysis of complement-taking verbs such as mzi as a negative attitudinal marker and stance adverbials such as taipaa as an epistemic-cum-evidential-cum-attitudinal marker respectively (see also Yap, Chor & Wang 2012 for Mandarin kongpa). In this paper, we seek to explore issues related to the following questions: (1) How do complement-taking verbs grammaticalize into stance adverbials at the left periphery and then further develop into parenthetical stance markers in pre-predicate clause-medial position? (2) What types of stance markers tend to occupy clause-medial as opposed to sentence final position? (3) How do stance markers in clause-medial position differ in function from those at the left or right periphery (e.g. discourse particles and sentence final particles)? (4) Are clause-medial stance markers oriented more toward pragmatic functions that are subjective as opposed to intersubjective in nature? Data for our analysis come primarily from the Hong Kong University Cantonese Corpus and PolyU Corpus of Spoken Chinese.