Speaker: Ka-Fai Yip (Yale University)
Title: A compositional account of “only” doubling
Time: Wednesday, March 15th, 1pm – 2pm
Abstract: Cross-linguistically, exclusive particles ‘only’ may be doubled with a single focus association, posing a problem for the Principle of Compositionality (Dutch: Barbiers 2014; German: Hole 2015; Korean: Lee 2005; Mandarin: Hole 2017, Sun 2021; Vietnamese: Hole 2017, Erlewine 2017; i.a.). The predominant account, operator-particle approach (Quek & Hirsch’s 2017; cf. Branan & Erlewine 2023), explains doubling of adverbial and adfocus particles by treating the latter as semantically vacuous concord markers that establish a syntactic dependency with the former. In this study, I focus on an understudied case of ‘only’ doubling of adverbial particles and sentence-final particles (SFPs) in Cantonese (Law 2004, Lee 2019), which is also attested in Mandarin (Erlewine 2011) and Vietnamese (Hole 2013). While I follow the tenet of the operator-particle approach that one particle is dependent on another one (which is an operator), I pursue a different route in two-dimensional semantics concerning at-issueness and argue that both particles have focus-sensitive contributions, distributed in different meaning dimensions. Specifically, the SFPs relate the focus alternative set quantified by adverbial ‘only’, the genuine exclusive operator, to the discourse by requiring the excluded alternatives to be contextually salient. Informally, the SFPs add a “contrastive” flavor to the exclusive focus. I further demonstrate how the dependency between the two particles may be accounted for by the semantics of the SFPs in terms of distinguishing excluded alternatives from the presupposed proposition, and offer a compositional analysis. I will also address issues raised by scalar readings and how to unify non-scalar and scalar uses in ‘only’ doubling.