Erlewine, Michael Yoshitaka, 2019.
“Uses of Tibetan yin.n’ang.”
Presented at the 2019 Singapore Summer Meeting.
The Tibetan particle yin.n’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.n’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.