How is "silence" represented syntactically?
What can tone do beyond lexical disambiguation in tonal languages?
Cantonese has a rich inventory of sentence-final particles. For my 1st screening project/MA thesis at USC, I am investigating 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 (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
Update (4/26/2025): This project was presented as a poster at WCCFL43, University of Washington, Seattle!
(Abstract) (WCCFL Poster) (WCCFL Proceedings) (SuB30 Slides)
I am currently exploring a novel case of tonal morphology in 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 am currently 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.'
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.