Focus particle semantics
Focus particles such as only, even, and also relate the current utterance to other alternatives in the discourse. While particles with these three, well-studied functions are common in language of the world, their precise semantics can vary, and languages also have particles which express different meanings, or meanings which cross-cut these common categories. My own work has studied unique focus particles in Burmese and Tibetan.
My student Keely New and I have investigated the Burmese focus particle hma, which expresses exhaustivity in some contexts but a scalar, even-like meaning in other contexts. We propose that hma is uniformly a not-at-issue scalar exhaustive, and derive these two uses through a scope ambiguity with respect to negation. We also analyze the relationship between hma and the sentence-final mood marker dar as an instance of pragmatic focus concord, best explained through the interaction of these particles’ independent semantics, rather than the result of morphosyntactic agreement.
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Erlewine and New, 2021.
“A variably exhaustive and scalar focus particle and pragmatic focus concord in Burmese.”
Semantics & Pragmatics 14:7, pages 1–54. DOI: 10.3765/sp.14.7 -
New and Erlewine, 2018.
“The expression of exhaustivity and scalarity in Burmese.”
Proceedings of SALT 28, pages 271–288. DOI: 10.3765/salt.v28i0.4442
In recent work, I have studied the Tibetan particle yin.na’ang. Yin.na’ang has three uses: (a) as a counterexpectational discourse particle (like English ‘but’ or ‘however’), (b) as a scalar concessive particle, and (c) to form free choice items with wh-words. Morphologically, yin.na’ang is transparently the combination of a copular verb, conditional ending, and scalar particle (e.g. ‘even’). I develop a compositional semantics for three functions from these ingredients, and also advocate for the extension of this approach to Japanese demo which has a similar distribution and (historical) morphological makeup.
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2020.
“Counterexpectation, concession, and free choice in Tibetan.”
Proceedings of NELS 50, volume 1, pages 227–236. -
2020.
“Universal free choice from concessive copular conditionals in Tibetan.”
Monotonicity in Logic and Language, pages 13–34. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-662-62843-0_2 -
2020.
“Counterexpectation, concession, and free choice in Tibetan and beyond.”
Invited talk at TripleA 7.