What can tone do beyond lexical disambiguation in tonal languages?
How is "silence" represented syntactically?
How do we interpret rhetorical utterances?
Rhetorical utterances employ the same sentence types as ordinary questions and assertions, yet differ systematically in how they engage with discourse structure and speaker commitment. How do we understand and interpret rhetorical utterances in discourse?
I investigated the role of the sentence-final particle me1 in context update. Additionally, I look at how a final low tone can combine with me1 and contribute an independent piece of meaning. The final low tone can be applied to other Cantonese sentence-final particles, accounting for the systematic differences in the high-tone vs. low-tone sentence-final particle pairs in Cantonese.
Update (1/31/2026): This will be published in Proceedings of SuB30, titled Obligatory Speaker-Oriented Rhetoricality: the Case of Cantonese Me↓-Utterances [LingBuzz]
Update (9/25/2025): This project was presented as a talk, titled Compositional Rhetoricality: the Case of Cantonese Sentence-Final Particle me1 and me↓ at SuB30, Goethe University Frankfurt.
Update (9/4/2025): This will be published in Proceedings of WCCFL43, titled Context Update with Cantonese Sentence-Final Particle me1 and the Role of the Final Low Tone [LingBuzz]
Update (4/26/2025): This project was presented as a poster at WCCFL43, University of Washington, Seattle!
I am currently exploring a novel case of tonal morphology in my heritage language, Nantou Hua, a rapidly vanishing Cantonese variety spoken by the autochthonous population in Shenzhen, China. Preliminary data suggest that a class of denominal verbs exhibits a tonal alternation: the same root surfaces with its lexical tone in nominal contexts, but the tone is systematically lowered in verbal contexts. I argue that the tonal pattern in Nantou Hua suggests that the descriptively instrumental "denominal" verbs involve direct root attachment of the categorizing v to a root, without the mediation of an n-layer.
Update (2/25/2026): The project has been accepted as a talk at WCCFL44, and as a poster at GLOW48 (canceled the latter due to logistical reasons).
You can find some of the original recordings here
(Manuscript in progress, please contact me for the newest version)
I am exploring focus/ellipsis in Pulaar (a Niger-Congo language). Some interesting things showed up in my exploration, e.g., Pulaar uses different forms of wh-words in regular wh-question contexts and slicing contexts.
won pi:do rawandu-ndu, kono mi anda (*ko) (hol) mo fi: rawandudu.
someone hit dog-DEF but 1SG know-NEG COP Q who hit dog-DEF
'Someone hit the dog, but I don't know who hit the dog.'
vs. ...kono mi anda (ko) *(hol) lo-n.
but 1SG know-NEG COP Q O_CLASS.MARKER-N
'Someone hit the dog, but I don't know who (≈which person) it is.'
You can find some of the data that I have collected and organized here
For my master's thesis at Leiden University, I looked at why-stripping in Mandarin Chinese. Yoshida et at. (2015) argue for a move-and-delete analysis for English why-stripping (e.g., Su loves linguistics, but I don't understand why linguisticst [Su loves t] ) based on various connectivity properties such as variable binding and case sensitivity. Mandarin why-stripping exhibits similar connectivity effects. Additionally, Mandarin why-stripping requires the presence of the copula shi (e.g., ...weishenme *(shi) yuyanxue '...why COP linguistics'). I argue that the copula seen in Mandarin why-stripping is identical to the focus-introducing shi in Mandarin.
(Leiden University Repository)