Abstract
This paper deals with the Cantonese morpheme gwai2 (
, lit. ‘ghost’) which, besides its spooky nominal use, also conveys expressive meaning when modifying a wide range of expressions: adjectives, verbs, wh-pronouns, etc. We begin by reviewing the empirical domain of gwai2 and different claims of the literature concerning its dual nature as an intensifier and a mixed-expressive conveying at-issue negation. We discuss both of these claims, showing that gwai2 cannot be treated as an intensifier in the usual sense, and that it does not contribute a truth-conditional negation, but rather a form of denial. We then propose a unified analysis of the morpheme based on the assumption that it indicates a negative attitude of the speaker towards its argument, notably by showing how to derive denials from this negative attitude.
The authors would like to thank Andy Chin, Shin Kataoka and David Li, as well as the audience at LENLS 14 and the third Okinawan Semantics Workshop organized under the auspices of the Asian Semantics Society, especially C. Davis, Y. Hara, E. McCready, M. Yoshitaka Erlewine and L. Rieser for their comments and discussions.
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Notes
- 1.
Beltrama and Lee 2015 argue that the “nobody” usage diachronically came first, with gwai2 acting as a subject NP, later reanalysed as a pro-drop construction, thus yielding the second reading. According to them, the “nobody” reading was pragmatically derived from the fact that ghosts do not exist, which entails that nobody knows. For reasons of space we will not evaluate that proposal.
- 2.
This does not mean gwai2 necessarily convey negation if it modifies a state-denoting utterance. For example, if it is infixed between a verb stem and the non-progressive continuous aspect marker zyu6, gwai2 does not mark denial but only its expressive meaning (cf. next section).
-
(i)
zoek3 gwai2 zyu6 tiu4 ngau4zai1fu3.
wear gwai asp cl jeans
s/he bloody wore jeans.
-
(i)
- 3.
Note that the content target can itself involve a negation, e.g. (i) (suggested by a reviewer).
- (i):
-
- A::
-
Siu-ming, who is not a linguist, could not understand the importance of his own dialect.
- B::
-
keoi5 hai6 gwai2 m4 hai6 linguist.
he is gwai neg is linguist Like hell he’s not a linguist.
- 4.
Compare with the case of French vache/vachement (‘bovine/cowish’ and its derived adverb) which are underspecified in a similar way as English fucking.
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Winterstein, G., Lai, R., Luk, Z.Ps. (2018). Denials and Negative Emotions: A Unified Analysis of the Cantonese Expressive Gwai2. In: Arai, S., Kojima, K., Mineshima, K., Bekki, D., Satoh, K., Ohta, Y. (eds) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI-isAI 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10838. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93794-6_19
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