Congratulations to Dr. Seng-hian Lau, one of our recent Ph.D.'s, who was the winner of the Best Ph.D. dissertation Award from the Linguistic Society of Taiwan!

The title and abstract of his dissertation are:

Charting the High Seas: A Cartographic View of Taiwanese Southern Min from the Syntax–Pragmatics Interface

Abstract

With the introduction of the Cartographic Approach (Rizzi 1997; Cinque 1999), syntacticians now have a new perspective in exploring the syntax–pragmatics interface. Well-known by its more analytic strategy to represent the scope relation, since then, Mandarin Chinese (MC) has played a crucial role in depicting the syntactic topography for its strict syntax–semantics correspondence encoded by the notion “the height of interpretation.” Nonetheless, Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM), an even more analytic member in the East Asian languages, has drawn much less attention so far.

Thanks to its strong analyticity, TSM furnishes overt function words, which are discourse-oriented and have no counterparts in MC; therefore, this provides convenient access to extend our research into the far left periphery, the uncharted seas seating the syntax–pragmatics interface.

By looking into the four elements with six usages in total, I demonstrate how vividly the language incarnates the interactions between speaker and hearer, not-at-issue and at-issue content, common ground and new information, and topics and evidentiality.
At the uppermost positions, leh1 (咧) and leh2 (咧) realize the heads of SA shell, and the projection embodies the interplay between the speaker and the addressee (Speas & Tenny 2003). Unlike previous studies that claim the discovery of a lexical item under this projection (Hill 2007; Haegeman & Hill 2011, 2013; Haegeman 2014), leh1 (咧) and leh2 (咧) have nothing to do with vocative, which is supposed hierarchically lower; instead, these two elements are intertwined with the speaker’s and the hearer’s concern with respect to the proposition. With these two best candidates that illustrate the existence of the SA shell, TSM, to my knowledge, is a real Speas-Tennian language. In addition to the syntax and semantics of leh1 (咧) and leh2 (咧), I also point out another usage of leh (leh3), which is lower and interacts with the dictum focus marker in a rhetorical question conveying the speaker’s attitude. The particle leh (咧), with a series of usages from low to high, derived from a process of grammaticalization exemplifies the nullification of Transparency Principle (Lightfoot 1979; cf, Tsai 2015a).

Albeit shì (是) ‘be’ in MC has been rather investigated since the early days of Sino-Tibetan linguistics—probably due to neglect of the language in question and its colloquial register—the two usages of sī (是) ‘be’ focused on in this thesis have never been mentioned in the literature. As another instance of violating the Transparency Principle, the word is now employed as a dictum focus and a commenting verum focus marker in TSM, in addition to its well-known copular usage and the disputed focus marking cognates. With the fact that it functions to emphasize the not-at-issue comment from the speaker, the data constitutes a challenge against the camp, which suggests the analysis of all its occurrences as copulas in a unified fashion (e.g., Cheng 2008).

Also frequently found in daily conversation, the sentence-initial ah (啊) is carefully examined herein. Unlike other introductory elements, this element is conditioned both discoursally and syntactically. Only second to the speech act (SA) shell, it bridges the antecedent sentence or the context and the following sentence. Additionally, it requires a contrast between the two bridged by itself. This element, once again, illustrates how syntax and pragmatics collaborate and actualize this collaboration in lexical items.

Last, a chapter is devoted to the enquiry into the distribution and derivation of the evidential bô (無), a particle whose occurrences found not only at the sentence-final position but across the sentence. Empirically, if the generalizations are correct, we have found a counterpart of mutual knowledge evidentials in an East Asian language (Hintz & Hintz 2017). Even more interestingly, this particle may trigger the topicalization of part of or the whole sentence based on the speaker’s judgment regarding which part of the proposition is noticeable by the addressee in the context, under the notion of discourse topic (cf. QUD; question under discussion). Because the main motivation of this preposing is more about establishing or confirming the current discourse goal that determines what is relevant, unsurprisingly, the element is also pinpointed in the far left periphery as the last piece of the jigsaw is worked out in the thesis.