The Cantonese ne1 revisited: a syntactic and semantic study on the sentence-final particle

Abstract

This project studies the syntax of the sentence-final particle (SFP) ne in Cantonese, a language that has an especially rich collection of SFPs.

Abstract as the meanings of SFPs are, diagnostic tests such as co-occurrence test and topic-focus comparison will be introduced. With the results I have got, it follows that ne in Cantonese can denote various core meanings. Essentially, I argue that when ne is in Focus, it points at both the focus of a sentence and the evaluation; when ne is in Degree, it only denotes speaker-evaluation. Given the complementary distribution of the both realizations, I propose the Focus-Degree movement of ne, which is motivated by the change of sentence meaning when the sentences do not have focus. Since ne in the Degree position is "attention-drawing" due to its evaluative property, it as well moves from Degree to CoA under the hearer-oriented intonation contour.

The prominence of ne in Cantonese questions also triggers various discussions on the formal feature of the particle. While some linguists offer evidence of ne being able to attach to non-interrogative elements to form questions, this paper further investigates into these types of questions and proposed that the [+Q] scope of ne-attached questions in fact belongs to the questions themselves.