Particles of (Un)expectedness: Cantonese Wo and Lo

Abstract

Cantonese has a number of sentence-final particles which serve various communicative functions. This paper looks into two of the most frequently used particles, wo3 and lo1. We propose that wo3 and lo1 are expressive items: Wo3 indicates unexpectedness of the propositional content or the current discourse move, while lo1 indicates expectedness of the propositional content or the current discourse move. We employ Default Logic to characterize the notion of (un)expectedness by normality conditionals. The analysis has a further implication on the Gricean Cooperative Principle in that the use of wo3 and lo1 makes reference to the general world knowledge which includes conditions on how the discourse should normally proceed.

The research is partly supported by City University of Hong Kong Strategic Research Grant (7004334) awarded to the first author and by JSPS Kiban C Grant #25370441 awarded to the second. We would like to thank our student helpers, Peggy Pui Chi Cheng and Phoebe Cheuk Man Lam, Jerry Hok Ming So and Agnes Nga Ting Tam and the audience at LENLS2015 for helpful comments. We are also grateful to Shinichiro Ishihara, Kazuya Wada and Mutsuyo Wada for their help in statistics.

A Experiments

1.1 A.1 Experiment I: Naturalness Rating

The predictions for the distribution of particles and context are as follows:

The purpose of Experiment I is to verify these predictions.

Method

Stimuli. The stimuli had two fully-crossed factors—contexts (common ground/expected/unexpected) and sentence-final particles (laa/lo/wo), which resulted in nine conditions.

Each of the nine conditions had 12 items, resulting in 108 target sentences (12 items * 9 conditions). 36 questions from another experiment were also included.

Procedure. The rating experiment was conducted in a quiet meeting room at City University of Hong Kong. The stimuli were presented in Chinese characters by Qualtrics.² The first page of the test showed the instructions.

In the main section, the participants were asked to read each stimulus, and then judge the naturalness of the stimuli on a 7-point scale (provided in Chinese characters): from “7: very natural” to “1: very unnatural”.

The main experiment was organized into 12 blocks. Each block contained 9 items. None of the stimuli were repeated. To avid minimal pair sentences from appearing next to each other, the order of the blocks and the stimuli within each block were randomized by the Qualtrics software.

Participants. Ten native speakers of Cantonese participated in the rating experiment. They were undergraduate students recruited from City University of Hong Kong and received 80 Hong Kong dollars as compensation.

Statistics. The responses were recorded as numerical values: from very natural=7 to very unnatural=1. Context types and particle types were fixed factors. To analyze the results, a general linear mixed model (Baayen 2008; Baayen et al. 2008; Bates 2005 was run using the lmerTest package (Kuznetsova et al. 2015) implemented in R (R Core Team 2015). Context types and particle types were the fixed factors. Speakers and items were the random factors. The p-values were calculated by the Markov chain Monte Carlo method using the LanguageR package (Baayen 2013).

If the naturalness of the particles depends on the type of context, then the dependency is expected to result in a significant interaction between contexts and particles.

Fig. 1.

Average naturalness ratings

Result. Figure 1 shows the average naturalness ratings in each condition. The discussion above leads to the prediction that lo-utterances are more natural in expected contexts than wo-utterances. This prediction was confirmed ($t= -2.695$, $p<0.001$). In unexpected contexts, wo-utterances are more natural in expected contexts than lo-utterances ($t= -1.941$, $p<0.1$).

1.2 A.2 Experiment II: Force-Choice

In Experiment II, Predictions parallel to Experiment I are attested in a force-choice experiment.

Method

Stimuli. The same contexts and sentences as Experiment I are used. There were 12 items and each question had 3 contexts (common ground/expected/ unexpected), resulting in 36 questions (12 items * 3 contexts). 108 questions from another experiment were also included.

Procedure. In the main section, the participants were asked to read each context, and then select the most natural utterance among the three choices, utterances suffixed with laa/lo/wo.

The main experiment was organized into 12 blocks. Each block contained 3 items. The other aspect of the procedure was the same as Experiment I.

Participants. Ten native speakers of Cantonese who did not participate in Experiment I participated in the force-choice experiment. The other aspect of the procedure was the same as Experiment I.

Statistics. The responses were recorded as categorical data. To analyze the results, chisq.test() was run implemented in R (R Core Team 2015). If the naturalness of particle depends on the type of context, then the dependency is expected to result in a significant interaction between contexts and particles.

Table 1. Total of Force-choice test

Result. Table 1 shows the total of responses to each condition. Lo-utterances were selected in expected contexts more than in unexpected contexts ($\texttt {X\hbox {-}squared} = 12.333,p< 0.001$). Wo-utterances were selected in unexpected contexts more than in expected contexts ($\texttt {X\hbox {-}squared} = 9.2807,p< 0.01$).