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 (9/4/2025): 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 (7/30/2025): This project will be presented as a talk, titled Compositional Rhetoricality: the Case of Cantonese Sentence-Final Particle me1 and me↓ at SuB30, Goethe University Frankfurt.
Update (4/26/2025): This project was presented as a poster at WCCFL43, University of Washington, Seattle!
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
vs. ...kono mi anda (ko) *(hol) lo-n.
but 1SG know-NEG COP Q O_CLASS.MARKER-N
I am currently exploring verb marking in Nantou Hua, a lesser-documented and rapidly vanishing dialect of Cantonese spoken in the Nantou area of Shenzhen, China. It appears that Nantou Hua uses a tonal morpheme for verb marking (much like Old Chinese, but not as well preserved in other modern Cantonese varieties).
Ky33 yoŋ21 boʊ55 leɪ21 boʊ21 t͡ʃa33.
3SG use pot to use.pot.to.boil tea
‘He uses a pot to boil the tea.’
Ky33 za55 t͡ʃɛ55 hy33 t͡ʃɛ21 ky33 ny21 fan21 oʔ21ki55.
3SG hold car go give.a.ride 3SG daughter come home
‘He drove a car to give a ride to his daughter to come home.’
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.