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Article published In: Concentric
Vol. 47:2 (2021) ► pp.253–299

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Taxonomy of questions in Taiwan Southern Min

 | Tunghai University
 | Tunghai University | National Chengchi University
Published online: 17 November 2021
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/consl.00029.her
Abstract
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, Seng-hian. 2010a. Syntax of Kám Questions in Taiwanese. MA thesis, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei.), 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, C.-T. James. 1988a. Hanyu zhengfan wenju de mozu yufa [A modular grammar of Chinese A-not-A questions]. Zhongguo Yuwen 2041:247–264.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, . 1991. Modularity and Chinese A-not-A questions. Interdisciplinary Approaches to Language, ed. by Carol Georgopolous and Roberta Ishihara, 305–332. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). However, when kám is short for kámkong ‘don’t tell me’, similar to the Mandarin nandao, it appears in a polar question.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Criteria for a two-way distinction in Mandarin
    • 2.1The two-way semantic distinction in terms of answers
    • 2.2The ‘ma vs. ne’ distinction
    • 2.3The ‘nandao vs. daodi’ distinction
    • 2.4Intervention effect
    • 2.5The availability of the indirect question counterpart
    • 2.6An interim summary
  • 3.Taxonomy of questions in TSM
    • 3.1Previous four-way classification
    • 3.2IS questions vs. CS questions in TSM
    • 3.3Disjunctive questions and wh-questions as IS questions
    • 3.4An interim summary
  • 4.Questions with interrogative sentence-final particles
    • 4.1A-not-A questions
    • 4.2Sentence-final polar question particles or question tags?
    • 4.3An interim summary
  • 5.The status of kám questions
    • 5.1Two forms of kám
    • 5.2The interrogative kám questions as A-not-A questions
    • 5.3The focus effects of the interrogative kám
    • 5.4An interim summary
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • List of abbreviations
  • References
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