Projects: Focus particle semantics   Non-interrogative uses of wh-words  

The expression yin.na’ang in Tibetan is (a) a discourse particle expressing counterexpection (‘however’), (b) a concessive scalar particle and (c) forms free choice items together with wh-words. Morphologically, yin.na’ang is a transparent combination of a copula, conditional ending, and even. In this talk, I document these uses of yin.na’ang from original fieldwork and propose a compositional semantics which derives this range of uses. Finally, I briefly discuss similar phenomena in Dravidian languages (Balusu 2019, 2020) and with Japanese demo, which cover the range of uses in (a–c) and also derive from similar ingredients.

See NELS proceedings paper and manuscript on universal free choice

Keywords: Tibetan counterexpectation focus particle concessive scalar particle free choice wh-quantification