Epistemic Indefinites and Reportative Indefinites in Cantonese

摘要

This paper examines the syntactic and semantic properties of the two understudied uses of wh-expressions in Cantonese, in the form of m-zi-wh 'not-know-wh' and wh-wh (wh-doublets). We argue that they are, respectively, Epistemic Indefinites (EIs) and Reportative Indefinites (RIs). We suggest that the speaker's ignorance associated with EIs and reportative implication associated with RIs, are conventional implicatures. Building on their distributional similarities, we propose a unified syntactic and semantic analysis for both EIs and RIs in Cantonese.