Taxonomy of questions in TaiwanSouthern Min

Contra the conventional four-way distinction of syntactically-formed questions in Taiwan Southern Min (TSM): (i) yes-no, (ii) A-not-A, (iii) disjunctive, and (iv) wh-questions (e.g., Lau 2010a), we justify a more revealing dichotomy of confirmation-seeking (CS) polar questions and information-seeking (IS) constituent questions, based on a suite of semantic and syntactic tests proposed in extensive literature for Mandarin and adapted further for TSM, where A-not-A belongs to the disjunctive type, which is in turn a subcategory of IS constituent questions. Controversies over the proper status of some sentence-final question particles and kám questions are also deliberated. Dismissing some alleged polar question particles as polar or A-not-A tags, we recognize nih and honnh as interrogative polar particles. We also show that kám has two underlying forms. One is a portmanteau word of the modal kánn and the negator m̄ and thus forms a whether-or-not disjunctive question (Huang 1988a, 1991). However, when kám is short for kámkong ‘don’t tell me’, similar to the Mandarin nandao, it appears in a polar question.

A corpus-based study of directives in Taiwanese Southern Min

This study aims to examine the subtypes of directives and their realization patterns in Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM). The data were drawn from a play script corpus published in the 20th century. Nine directive subtypes were identified: advice, begging, invitation, order, offer, request, suggestion, urge, and warning. The realization patterns were analyzed in terms of the main components in the directives: alerter, discourse marker, politeness marker, subject, modal expression, verb phrase, and utterance final particle. The analysis reveals a number of features: (1) Alerters mainly take the form of an address term; (2) Utterance-initial discourse markers are mainly realized by tan ‘now’; (3) The subject is either hearer-dominated or speaker- and hearer-dominated, with the latter expressing solidarity in casual situations; (4) the politeness marker chhiáⁿ tends to take an overt subject; (5) The modal verb tio̍h accounts for the majority of subtypes; (6) The dominant verb types include dynamic, stative, uttering, and ingesting verbs; (7) Complex verb constructions mainly include directional verbs, disposal markers, and benefactive verbs; (8) Directional verbs are pervasive across all directives. A metaphorical transfer is operative in the use of directional verbs. Those marking an action toward the speaker (e.g., lâi ‘come’) are strongly associated with a positive attitude, while those expressing movement away from the speaker (e.g., khì ‘go’) are highly connected to an adversative mood. The omnipresence of [lâi V] suggests that it has been conventionalized as a default bundle to express politeness.

Effect of tone sandhi on singing in Chaozhou dialect

The Chaozhou dialect is a branch of Southern Min Chinese with eight tones and a wealth of tone sandhi. In this paper we explore whether there is a tone-sandhi effect on melodic construction and tone realisation in Chaozhou song, using a corpus analysis and observational study. Outcomes from the corpus analysis show a strikingly higher rate of tone-melody matching in Sandhi dataset than that in Citation dataset. In the observational study, we found significant differences between sandhi form and citation form concerning tones /53/ and /21/, but no significant difference for tones /35/ and /213/. Results suggest that falling tones in the final position of a phrase tended to exhibit a larger contoural range, and that tones in non-final positions may be more affected by the pitches of tones that precede or follow them.

Some temporal expressions in early Southern Min play scripts

Drawing on the data in early Southern Min play scripts, this paper explores temporal expressions—in particular temporal adverbials—which bear on the issues of their grammatical categories and syntactic placement. Considerable space is devoted to clarifying two kinds of distinctions of temporal adverbials on the strength of attested examples. A distinction is made between deictic temporal adverbials and determiner phrase-derived temporal adverbials. Similarly, durative adverbials are shown to behave differently from punctual adverbials. Finally, I argue that the metonymic semantic shift of deictic temporal adverbials denoting tomorrow and yesterday/the day before yesterday is grounded in the constraint of proximity to the deictic center of today in connection with the backdrop of diachronic development.

Prosodic Prominence – A Cross-Linguistic Perspective

This paper is concerned with the contributions of signal-driven and expectation-driven mechanisms to a general understanding of the phenomenon of prosodic prominence from a cross-linguistic perspective. It serves as an introduction to the concept of prosodic prominence and discusses the eight papers in the Special Issue, which cover a genetically diverse range of languages. These include Djambarrpuyŋu (an Australian Pama-Nyungan language), Samoan (an Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian language), the Indo-European languages English (Germanic), French (Romance), and Russian (Slavic), Korean (Koreanic), Medumba (Bantu), and two Sino-Tibetan languages, Mandarin and Taiwanese Southern Min.