Sekali, how and lucky expressing unexpectedness in colloqial singapore english

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 ‘SEKALI’ Colloquial Singapore English (henceforth referred to as CSE) has a lexical item, sekali, which is commonly found in a variety of discourse situations, illustrated in (1) – (5): (1) A : John didn’t study for his exams. B : Sekali he pass (He may pass). (2) B is trying to convince A to do his homework B : You better do your homework. Sekali the teacher scold you then you know. (The teacher may scold you for not doing your homework) (3) It is sunny and A is preparing to leave the house. B: Eh bring an umbrella. Sekali rain ah. (It might rain) (4) B is trying to advise A against skiving during work A: Eh, call me when got work to do B: Sekali boss catch you sleeping how? (What would you do if the boss catches you sleeping?) (5) B consults his father about starting a business B: pa (Gloss: Dad), can I start a business of my own? A: Do you know how difficult it is to run a business? You don’t even know anything about business. Sekali you become bankrupt then you know. Sentences such as (1) to (5) show us that sekali is used to connect one statement with the next and it appears that the content of what follows after sekali is restricted: *(6) A: John didn’t study for his exams. B: Sekali he fail. The conversational situation and the preceding utterance that is presented in (6) is exactly the same with that of (1), with the exception of the reply. The fact that not any kind of reply to the preceding utterance is allowed suggests that some discourse/pragmatic requirement needs to be fulfilled before a reply 1 may occur with sekali. This may be compared with the English conjunction, so which has a coherence relationship often described as a ‘reasonable consequence’ (Rundle, 1992; Fraser, 1990). That is, the clause that occurs after so is the expected consequence of the clause that precedes it, illustrated in (7) -(9): (7) He didn’t study for the exams so he failed. (8) *He didn’t study for the exams so he passed. (9) It was raining, so we didn’t go out. Putting aside for the moment the fact that the subordinate clause of so refers to a completed event while the post-sekali utterance typically identifies a hypothetical event that may result from the conversational context, a preliminary comparison of (7) and (8) with (1) and (6) suggests that the distributional properties of sekali is such that it cannot be used in situations where so is allowed and vice versa. The difference between the two items is that whereas the scenario that follows so is expected given the context of the preceding utterance, the event that sekali expresses is the opposite – it is unexpected. The unacceptability of (6) (and the acceptability of (1)) may be explained by considering that the expected logical consequence of ‘John not studying for his exams’ is that of him failing his exams. As only an utterance highlighting an unexpected outcome is allowed after sekali, the statement in (6) is unacceptable. Similarly, Speaker B’s utterance in (2) indicates that A’s act of not doing his homework carries with it an expectation that he will not be reprimanded or caught; a scolding from the teacher is thus unexpected. Since the common property that appears to explain the examples is closely related to the denial of some form of expectation between one or more speakers, for the 2 remainder of this thesis, I will simply refer to this coherence relationship of sekali as ‘unexpectedness’. 1.2 ‘UNEXPECTEDNESS’ IN OTHER CSE CONSTRUCTIONS While ‘unexpectedness’ is central to understanding the behavior of the sekali construction, it appears that there are other constructions in CSE that are similarly used to express some form of unexpectedness. One example is the CSE item lucky, illustrated in (10) and (11): (10) A: I was going to be drenched in the rain. Lucky someone lent me an umbrella. *(11) A: I was going to be drenched in the rain. Lucky no one lent me an umbrella. Like the sekali construction, the acceptability of (10) may be explained by considering that the speaker’s expectation was that he/she was expecting to be drenched in the rain, and lucky is used to convey the speaker’s experience of having the unexpected consequence of what he/she originally expected happen – to be offered an umbrella and thus not get drenched in the rain. Despite these similarities, a closer look at what kinds of utterances that can occur with the use of sekali and lucky show interesting observations about how unexpectedness interacts with that of adversity. Indeed, it appears that sekali is able to be used both to convey unexpectedness in terms of adverse events and non adverse events, while lucky appears to be negatively specified for adversity: (12) A: It seems that he is destined to be poor all his life. B: Sekali he win lottery. 3 In light of the phenomena discussed above, some of the questions that arise are: What is the function of sekali in CSE? Are other items that deal with expressing unexpectedness in CSE or its contact languages related? If so, how? This thesis aims to answer these questions, using data that I elicited from 10 speakers of CSE. In doing so, I show how these speakers convey unexpectedness with the use of the sekali and other related constructions. As I previously mentioned, expressing unexpectedness is not only exclusive to sekali, but is similarly found in other lexico-grammatical structures found within the CSE repertoire. To further explore this, I discuss another two related constructions – how and lucky, and show how these constructions are similar/different in conveying unexpectedness in CSE. There are several main reasons why it is relevant to discuss these constructions in terms of expressing unexpectedness in CSE. Firstly, while there has been fairly extensive literature pertaining to a wide range of lexiogrammatical items in the CSE repertoire, there has been a noticeable lack of studies on sekali and its role in CSE. In addition, these studies have so far focused on understanding the properties of the respective constructions and less on how these constructions compare to other similar/different constructions within CSE. While I recognize the importance and necessity in laying out the properties of constructions that have not yet been discussed, it is also a worthwhile attempt to investigate whether the same semantic constraints and properties that I use to understand sekali will also allow us to 4 explain the properties of other constructions that similarly express unexpectedness, thus making them a subset of constructions centered around achieving this communicative purpose. Finally, with the growing interest in the interaction between languages in a multilingual society, it is important to understand how meaning making is transferred from one language to another through the exchange of expressions. Sekali, which has its roots in the Malay Language and which is now commonly found in the CSE speech repertoire, provides us with an excellent example that may pave the way for further discussion in this area. 1.3 ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK In this study, I have taken a Constructional approach towards understanding the sekali and its related constructions, in particular the framework proposed by Construction Grammar (Fillmore et al., 1988; Fillmore & Kay, 1993; Goldberg, 1995). To take a Constructional approach is to treat the grammar of a language as being built on grammatical constructions, which then add to the compositional meaning of their parts (Lee, 2007). It needs to be mentioned that this thesis is not about Construction Grammar, but on sekali and its related constructions. Construction Grammar was chosen as the main descriptive framework for the study is due to its ability to represent meaning in the lexicon in a holistic manner, integrating the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic structures of the object of study. This allowed me to make surface level observations about the sekali construction without having to make any recourse to a deeper level of analysis. 5 As some readers may be unfamiliar with the framework, I have decided to dedicate a separate chapter aimed at a more detailed discussion on CG. Chapter 2 will thus outline some of the central features of the framework and provide the framework upon which this thesis is based upon. In addition, since sekali is a loanword that originates from the Malay Language, it is worthwhile to investigate some aspect of its change as it is borrowed into CSE. I therefore appeal to some of the insights provided by the Grammaticalization framework (Hopper &Traugott, 1993; Eckhart, 2006) in order to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of the construction. A discussion of the framework as well as sekali from a cross-language perspective will be presented in Chapter 4. 1.4 METHODOLOGY Before I proceed with the thesis, it is important to first mention the nature of my data. The bulk of the examples used in this thesis are drawn from recordings of spontaneous speech that I made while actively paying attention to instances of sekali and its related constructions in use among a wide variety of speakers. However, this recorded data may only represent a subset of possible structures allowed by the construction(s) due to factors such as conversational topic or the speech contexts which cannot be controlled when recording spontaneous data. I therefore supplemented these recordings with judgment elicitation. It should be noted that some of the constructed examples are accompanied by the addition of ‘scenarios’, or ‘contexts’. This was done deliberately to tease out certain aspects of meaning associated with the constructions that may not have been noticeable if I had used a pure judgment 6 elicitation methodology. All the examples (recorded and constructed) were tested against a group of 10 speakers of CSE, all whom possess a good command of the language. In the discussion that follows, an example that is judged unacceptable by the majority (if not all) of the speakers is represented by a ‘*’ before the sentence, and one that is acceptable by more than half, but not all the speakers is indicated by a ‘?’. 1.5 UNDERSTANDING TENSE IN CSE A significant number of the examples as presented in this thesis exhibit an apparent lack of tense. However, this does not mean that CSE speakers do not possess any conception of time. Indeed, As Fong (2004) notes, one of the more salient characteristics of the verb in CSE is the optionality of tense, number and person on the verb. To illustrate this, consider a Standard English sentence (13a) and its CSE counterpart in (13b): (13a) He won the card game yesterday. (13b) He win the card game yesterday. (13c) He win the card game everyday. The past tense, as shown in (13a) is just as likely to be expressed using the uninflected bare form of the verb, as in (13b). This property also extends to utterances containing more than one verb, where variable tense markings on the verbs are often used: (14) He came for the game, then he play a while and (he) go home. (=He came for the game, and then he played for a while and he went home.) 7 As Fong also notes, however, the variable tense marking is not totally random – in the presence of any time adverbials (e.g. yesterday, everyday) it cannot clash with the time expressed by these adverbials in the utterance: (15a) She goes to market everyday. (15b) She go to market everyday. *(15c) She went to market everyday. (intended meaning ‘she goes to market everyday’) In light of what has been discussed, the interlocutors’ interpretation of tense and time is inferred contextually. As it may be difficult for non-CSE speakers to understand which time is being expressed by a non-inflected utterance, especially in scenarios where the completion of the event, hypotheticality, etc. are important for the discussion to follow, glosses will be provided. 1.6 CENTRAL CLAIMS OF THE THESIS In this thesis, I demonstrate that sekali and its related constructions form a subset of lexico-grammatical items that express unexpectedness. Also, I show that sekali is derived from a Malay counterpart with an original meaning of ‘one time’ and has undergone the process of grammaticalization from a lexical to a more adverbial function in CSE. In addition, by understanding these constructions in terms of how adversity is expressed, I argue that the constructions provide strong evidence towards the claim that there is a subset of constructions in CSE that may be located along a spectrum of expressed adversity. 1.7 ORGANISATION OF THE THESIS This thesis is organized as follows: In Chapter 2, I will outline and justify the Constructional approach as my main framework of choice, and will identify 8 key features of the theory that I find useful in describing my data. This is followed by a detailed discussion of the sekali construction in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 carries on the discussion of sekali by understanding the construction from the point of view of Grammaticalization Theory. In Chapter 5, I discuss the how construction, a related construction that frequently occurs with sekali. In doing so, I argue for the possibility of a sekali-how construction. Chapter 6 introduces my final construction, lucky, which is used to express events that are viewed as positive to the speaker and demonstrates that sekali, how and lucky can be viewed as a subset of CSE constructions that are possibly situated along a spectrum of expressing unexpectedness in CSE. This is followed by Chapter 7, which consolidates the discussion in the previous chapter and links the findings in this study to similar findings found in cross-linguistic studies. Finally, the findings of the thesis are summarized in Chapter 8. 9 CHAPTER 2 ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK 2.1 INTRODUCTION In Chapter 1, I introduced the reader to the sekali construction. In this chapter, I outline the Construction Grammar framework in detail, justifying my choice of assuming a usage-based model of grammar for this study. The claims put forward by the framework has provided insights that have shaped my analytical methodology as well as my expectations in terms of what I might find during the course of understanding the construction(s). In the following few sections, I provide a brief overview of core concepts for those unfamiliar with the framework and update the reader on the current field of study in Construction Grammar. I begin with a discussion of the Construction Grammar framework and justify its relevance in the study of sekali in Section 2.2. In Section 2.3, I discuss the notion of the Grammatical Construction as used in this thesis. Finally, Section 2.4 attempts to locate our current study within a Cross-language Perspective. 2.2 CONSTRUCTION GRAMMAR Construction Grammar (henceforth referred to as CG) is a sign-based grammatical model that is formed around the notion of the ‘construction’ as the basic unit of analysis and representation. Its primary objective is no different from other kinds of grammar in that it attempts to represent the relationship between structure, meaning and use. Unlike other theories, however, CG views function and form as inseparable from one another and treats the grammar of a language as a repertoire of interrelated constructions 10 that integrate form and meaning in conventionalized ways. Indeed, as Fried and Östman (2003) suggest, to claim knowledge of a language is to say that one knows all its constructions. In addition, all dimensions of language (syntax, semantics, pragmatics, morphology, etc.) are treated as equal contributors to the structuring of linguistic expressions. Underlying this framework are the following hypotheses that may be said to constitute the conceptual basis of CG: i. The grammar of a language is constituted by ‘constructions’, conventionalized pairings of form and function that are used by speakers to form expressions. ii. These expressions are seen as a result of interaction between constructions in the language and the linguistic material (such as words) available. iii. Constructions are all assumed to co-exist in a multidimensional network of inheritance relationships based on certain shared properties (Östman and Fried, 2003). The primary motivation for CG comes from the observation that instances of expressions exist where the combination of the component parts does not produce meaning that is derivable from the sum of these parts. For example, the expression John kicked the bucket has an additional idiomatic meaning of the subject of the clause dying that cannot be derived from the sum of the component words kicked, the and bucket. In addition, one is unable to use *John kicked the pail to reflect the same kind of idiomatic meaning that kick 11 the bucket connotes. Lee’s (2007) paper on the progressive in English is also presents a strong case for the constructional approach, since the tense does not lie within the ing-form or the have auxiliary, but is manifested through a combination of both elements within a sentence. As CG assumes that the smallest unit of meaning is the construction, this implies that constructions are often constituted of other constructions (Kay, Fillmore & O’Connor, 1988; Kay and Fillmore, 1999). It is the interaction between these constituents that affect the syntactic and semantic properties of the resultant construction. To illustrate this, the transitive construction, John kicked the ball, is a combination of the NP construction, past tense construction as well as the John, definite determiner, kicked and ball constructions. In this sense, CG is able to account for the entire continuum of linguistic expressions, ranging from those that are highly irregular to those that are more common by providing the machinery to study how constructions are related to each other, and how they combine to form newer ones. Also, in line with the claims of the constructional approach, no construction is more central in terms of its role in creating and expressing meaning. While the intuitions that I have outlined above has led to the rise of several Construction Grammar frameworks aimed at formalizing the relationships between constructions, I will not discuss these formalisms in my thesis, but will instead appeal to the claims that are put forth by the model to understand the sekali construction. In doing so, I will explore the viability of using the constructional approach as a descriptive model for the analysis of cross- 12 linguistic data, more specifically constructions that result out of a contact situation. The nature of sekali in CSE presents an interesting case in point where the claims of Construction Grammar as a framework of analysis are concerned. While traditional generative grammars are designed to posit rules that are able to generate and accommodate an unlimited number of complex sentences, it is also true that these rules leave out many kinds of structures that cannot be accounted for, yet proliferate widely in everyday language use and comprehension by speakers of a given language. These are often treated as exceptions to the rule and therefore given a place in the periphery of the grammar, suggesting that they are accorded less importance as compared by examples that fit the general rule(s). However, the fact that these patterns are used in the first place and that they have not been explicitly taught to speakers of the language suggests that there is nothing trivial about these structures – they are important to the speakers of the language as a means of expression and communication just as any other structure in the language. Bringing our discussion to sekali, it is clear from the high frequency of usage in CSE that the structure is both functional and important to speakers of the language. If we begin from the assumption that language is symbolic in nature, sekali is important cognitively to CSE speakers in that it expresses some experience/phenomena that other structures are unable to do. Also, the relatively fossilized nature of its use and its origins in Malay suggest that it is not possible to begin from a generative standpoint of a simple sentence and generate more complex structures till we finally reach sekali. Due to this, taking a Constructional viewpoint will allow us to accord equal importance to 13 sekali as any other structure in the language, while making no commitment to any claims about its origin point which is difficult to determine, whether in Malay or otherwise. 2.2.1 THE COMPETENCE-BASED AND USAGE-BASED MODELS Due to the change in research priorities and interests over time, two main models of grammar have since emerged, termed as the ‘competence-based’ (Croft and Cruse, 2004: 291; Fillmore et. al.,1998; Kay, 2002; Kay and Fillmore, 1999) and ‘usage-based’ (Croft, 2001; Goldberg, 1995, 2007) models of grammar. While originating from the same tradition, these schools have since diverged in terms of their agreement of what constitutes a ‘construction’, as well as their motivations for studying it. The competence-based model attempts to account for generalizations in language without redundancy. Therefore, only form-meaning pairings where the meanings are not predicable from other pairings are considered as “constructions”. By this reasoning, expressions that are predictable from other generalizations are assumed not to be part of the speaker’s knowledge of language and the model represents the structure of linguistic knowledge as separate from how this knowledge is used during the process of communication. The usage-based model, on the other hand, recognizes the fact that speakers may in fact have knowledge of redundant constructions, and there is no reason why the two should not co-exist. Indeed, as Langacker (1987) argues, there is reason to believe that both item-specific knowledge and generalizations are required for language categorization. Therefore, both specific form-meaning 14 pairings and more general patterns are similarly considered as “constructions” under the usage-based view, even if the more specific examples may be explained in terms of the general rule and are thus predictable (Bybee and Hopper, 2001; Langacker, 1988; Tomasello, 2003). In addition, the model treats the separation of linguistic knowledge and knowledge of use as unrealistic, since processes of communication are assumed to play a critical role in the structuring of linguistic knowledge. This thesis aligns itself with the usage-based model of grammar, as my main aim is to investigate how constructions are used (and interpreted) in everyday communication. The competence-based model, which places a higher premium on constructional parsimony, may neglect certain features of language use such as processes of communication that may play an important part in the learning and transfer of constructions. Adopting the usage-based model will therefore allow me to observe constructions as they are spoken and used, even if they are instances of constructions that have been found to exist within the language repertoire. 2.3 THE GRAMMATICAL CONSTRUCTION How should the sekali construction be understood in the wider context of the CSE repertoire? Before I proceed to discuss this, I would like to first familiarize the reader with the notion ‘construction’ as used in Construction Grammar. Not surprisingly, what characterizes a construction has become a matter of confusion in recent days, considering that the term is found in diverse fields of research, and is often used interchangeably with terms such as ‘structure’ or ‘phrase’ (Östman and Fried, 2004: 1). 15 2.3.1 A FORM-MEANING PAIRING The notion ‘construction’ is the basic unit of analysis and representation in the Construction Grammar framework (Fillmore et. al., 1988; Fillmore and Kay, 1993; Goldberg, 1995). A construction is a form-meaning pairing that is used to build more complex linguistic expressions regardless of its semantic or formal complexity. Under this definition, a morpheme such as ‘un-’ in ‘uncomfortable’ and a more idiomatic phrase such as kicked the bucket are both considered constructions, since they each contribute some element of meaning to the rest of the unit. Central to this definition is the assumption that no unit of meaning is considered more ‘basic’ than any other; constructions differ from one another in the extent to which they make use of the resources available to them. This contrasts with other grammatical frameworks that assume atomic syntactic units as the core building blocks that combine with phrase structure rules to form language. As Croft and Cruise (2004) note, one may consider words, compositional phrases, idioms and even morphemes as examples of constructions, with the grammar of a language comprising a network of interrelated constructions. 2.3.2 A RESULT OF TYPIFIED LANGUAGE USE Central to the idea of constructions as form-meaning pairings is the assumption that they are the result of some degree of typification of language use over time. As noted by Östman and Fried (2004), constructions may be viewed as on a cline from being relatively productive to relatively frozen. Evidence from studies in Child Language Acquisition (c.f. Landau and Gleitman, 1985 cited in Goldberg, 1995) also appear to support this idea, where it is generally accepted that children learn expressions, in particular, 16 lexical meaning from observing it in use (Goldberg, 1995). During the course of communication, constructions are often transferred from one speaker to another and repeated during the course of everyday communication, resulting in certain expressions being learnt and their usage gradually fossilized over time. Understanding constructions as conventionalized expressions nicely accounts for the presence of sekali in the CSE language repertoire. Indeed, due to intense language contact between English and the vernacular such as Malay, among others, constructions are introduced into the language. The speakers of CSE eventually associate these constructions with certain meanings after repeated usage, leading to the formation of the CSE version of the ‘same’ construction. It should be recognized that this construction might not share the same meaning as its original source, since processes of language change such as grammaticalization, for instance, may lead to the subsequent shift in meaning and use of the construction over time. This is discussed in further detail in Section 4.4, where we see that sekali, originally having the literal meaning of one time in Malay, loses this meaning after being borrowed into CSE. 2.3.3 LEVELS OF SPECIFICITY Finally, constructions vary in degrees of specificity, with some lexically specified and others more schematic in nature. Kay and Fillmore’s (1999) study on the What’s X doing Y and Fillmore’s (1989) The greener the better constructions are clear examples of idiomatic constructions, where ‘what’s’ and ‘doing’ are lexically invariant parts of the construction while X and Y represent empty slots that require noun phrases. As they show in their paper, 17 the construction is more than a regular interrogative as it has a narrow range of meaning associated with it – its pragmatic function is to indicate the speaker’s judgment that there is an incongruity (for example, the statement What is this fly doing in my soup? is used to express the speaker’s judgment that the presence of a fly in his/her soup is contrary to expectations). In contrast, an expression such as John kicked the ball is an instance of a less specific construction, in this case a transitive verb construction. 2.4 CG IN A CROSS-LANGUAGE PERSPECTIVE As CG assumes constructions to be a result of highly repeated usage, one can certainly understand its applicability to cross-language and language contact situations. If one assumes that the desire to express oneself to a cooperative speaker is the underlying factor behind various sociolinguistic phenomena such as accommodation, and that constructions arise from repeated usage, then it is reasonable to suggest that when two speakers from the same linguistic community interact, there is a potential for constructions to be borrowed from one language to another. Indeed, we are able to explain these phenomena that have surfaced in the literature in terms of constructions and the exchange of constructions. Despite its potential for cross-language research, it should be mentioned that the model is not without its own fair share of criticisms. For one, the interpretation of usage from the usage-based model is rather restricted, at least from the socio-cultural point of view (Wee and Tan, 2008). Indeed, most of the research involving this model has mainly been interested in psycholinguistic processes and how human experiences are manifested in 18 language. Related studies have attempted to understand productivity and how it aids in the learning of specific constructions, especially in the context of child language acquisition (Goldberg, 2007; Tomasello, 2003). Thus, despite the general recognition that constructions are a manifestation of recurrent human experiences (Goldberg, 1995:5), the emphasis in CG has mainly centered on cognitively orientated linguistic analysis. Relevant features of human experience are typically characterized in terms of volition, motion, and force dynamics and a relatively large amount of attention is spent on understanding how speakers of a language express these everyday experiences. While this is valuable to the study of constructions, the consequence of this is that their socio-cultural contexts have received relatively little attention (Croft and Cruse, 2004:329; Östman and Fried, 2005:1). Indeed, as Croft (2001) suggests, CG needs to be seen as a part of a larger attempt to understand how humans use language to communicate and interact with one another. In an age where there is a huge degree of interaction and exchange between language environments, this aspect of language studies cannot be ignored. 2.5 SUMMARY In this chapter, I provided a brief overview of the CG framework and presented an argument for the use of a Constructual approach to the study of sekali and its related constructions. The assumptions that form the underpinning of the framework have informed my analysis of the constructions in many ways. In addition, I have chosen the usage-based model of grammar in approaching the constructions found in this thesis as it more accurately reflects the situation of language in use and allows for redundant 19 constructions to exist in a speaker’s language system. With the main framework introduced and the notion of ‘construction’ clarified, I may now proceed with my study. In the next chapter, I discuss the sekali construction in detail. 20 CHAPTER 3 THE SEKALI CONSTRUCTION 3.1 INTRODUCTION In Chapter 1, I briefly introduced the reader to the sekali construction. By comparing some of its grammaticality/ungrammaticality with the so construction in the English language and the lucky construction in CSE, I showed that it raises interesting questions about utterance interpretation that require answering. In this chapter, I follow up upon these questions and discuss the sekali construction in greater detail, focusing specifically on its semantic and distributional properties in section 3.2. In section 3.3, I make a brief discussion about its relationship with adversity. Finally in section 3.4, I bring the reader’s attention to a polysemous sense of sekali that I discovered during the course of my study. 3.2 SYNTAX AND SEMANTICS In Construction Grammar, semantics and syntax are assumed as inseparable layers in the meaning making process of language. As some of the semantic properties of sekali show overlap with its morphosyntactic properties and vice versa, I have decided to address the findings of both in the same section. Semantically, the notion of ‘unexpectedness’ that sekali expresses needs to be elaborated upon. In addition, the proposition that follows sekali takes the form of a hypothetical. Syntactically, the sekali construction can be characterized as follows: it functions as a discourse connector; its range extends to the immediate proposition preceding it; it may respond to a non-linguistic context. Finally, it may participate in limited question formation with another CSE item, how. I will discuss each of these points in turn. 21 3.2.1 ‘UNEXPECTEDNESS’ Recall that in Chapter 1, I suggested that only the unexpected outcome of the preceding utterance can appear in the post-sekali position. The unexpectedness that sekali expresses is fairly broad, such that any unexpected scenario that is plausible given the speech context can be expressed: (19) A: John secretly took some money from his dad’s wallet last night. B: Sekali his dad find out when he checks later. (20) A: Mary sang very well at the concert today. B: Sekali she has been doing this since she was ten. In (19), Speaker A’s utterance gives rise to an implication – namely that John’s dad is unaware of the missing money and is unlikely to check his wallet. It follows that John’s dad finding out about the missing money is unexpected for (19) to be considered grammatical to the speakers. Similarly, in (20), Speaker B’s utterance is acceptable if the context is such that the speakers expected Mary to have learnt how to sing just recently. In the event where it is known that Mary has received singing training since a young age, B’s utterance would be considered unacceptable. It should be noted that the unexpectedness should be considered with regard to some expectation that the speakers share, and may not necessarily be implicated by the pre-sekali utterance. To elaborate on this, the expectation in (19) arises from the linguistic context as Speaker A’s use of secretly implies that John’s father was unaware of the money being taken from his wallet. In (20) however, the expectation that Mary may have started singing recently cannot be directly derived from the utterance that Speaker A makes and must be inferred from the context. Thus, for Speaker B’s utterance to be legitimate, 22 it has to refer to some contextual expectation that he/she shares with Speaker A. This also explains why my respondents judged examples such as (21) as unacceptable: *(21) A: John secretly took some money from his dad’s wallet last night. B: Sekali he fail his exams. Without an available context, speakers find it difficult to draw a line of inference between the post-sekali utterance and the expected consequence that it is supposed to refer to. In fact, when a plausible context was provided for the same exchange (reproduced as (22) below for ease of reference), the utterance was immediately judged as acceptable: (22) John didn’t study for his exams and he knew of a way where he could bribe the examiner with a large amount of money. However, he didn’t have enough money. A: John secretly took some money from his dad’s wallet last night. B: Sekali he fail his exams. The post-sekali utterance in (22) is now acceptable as Speaker B is expressing unexpectedness with regard to what is expected from the speech context, namely that John can pass his exams by paying the bribe. Interestingly, while we have established that the context should be specified for the post-sekali utterance to be understood, there were some examples that were readily accepted without a accompanying context, as illustrated by (23): (23) A: John secretly took some money from his dad’s wallet last night. B: Sekali he spend it all on gambling again. It appears that while not related to the stealing of the money, the respondents were all able to ‘force’ an acceptable reading out of (23) by assuming that the 23 reason why John did not have money and had to steal from his father was because he had previously spent it on gambling. This suggests that there are some utterances that have a stronger sense of relevance with one another than others such that respondents who are not aware of the actual context of speech can supply their own in order to reach an acceptable interpretation of these utterances. This does not lie in the semantics of sekali per se, but the individual’s knowledge of the world influencing his/her judgments, in turn affecting his/her ability to construct a relevant context. The concepts of ‘stealing’ and ‘gambling’ for example are more easily associated than ‘stealing’ and ‘passing exams’. This explains why the contexts in (20) and (23) are so easily recovered. For (21) on the other hand, the connection between the post-sekali statement and the preceding utterance is weaker, or more difficult to arrive at, even if we attempt to search in the nonlinguistic context, requiring a more specific scenario before an acceptability judgment can be made. In sum, the semantics of sekali is fairly broad in that it expresses a wide range of unexpectedness. While a good deal of examples seen are often related to expressing unexpected consequences, I have shown that this should be broadened to include other examples where what is expressed is a plausible scenario relevant to the discourse that is unexpected. 3.2.2 EXPRESSING UNEXPECTEDNESS WITH A HYPOTHETICAL Let us now focus on the nature of the post-sekali statement. In all instances where sekali is used, the post-sekali statement takes the form of a hypothetical: 24 (24) A: I think I shall stay in school to do some work. B: You better go home. Sekali your mom need your help. (25) A: John didn’t buy any insurance when he went for holiday. B: Wah, sekali something happen to him when he’s there. As I have discussed in the previous section, the post-sekali utterances such as those in (24) and (25) express an event that is unexpected. However, at the point where the post-sekali statement is made, the speaker is unaware or has no possibility of committing to the truth of the statement. For example, Speaker B merely states the possibility of A’s mother requiring help in (24) is plausible, but makes no indication of his confidence of the event happening. At the same time, B is unaware of whether A’s mother will need help, because the event in the post-sekali statement will not be unexpected in that case. Similarly in (25), Speaker B expresses the possibility that something (bad) may happen - an unexpected event considering that the reason why John did not purchase any insurance is because he expects that nothing would happenbut does not make any commitment about his confidence in the event actually transpiring. In other words, what is actually expressed by sekali belongs to the realm of imagination rather than what is actually perceived by the speaker. Statements of this kind are broadly referred to as counterfactuals – an expression of non-factuality through partial reality (Ziegler, 2000; Yeh and Gentner, 2005), where the speaker simultaneously holds two different construals of a given state of affairs – the non-true reality and the alternate reality posited by his/her statement (Bryne, 2002). That being said, the subcategory of ‘hypothetical’ more accurately describes the post-sekali statements. The main distinction lies in the fact that counterfactuals include 25 past-time statements, often realized in Standard English using the past subjunctive, as illustrated in (26) below: (26) If he had bought ham, I would have made sandwiches. In the case of (26), the counterfactual interpretation is signaled by having the verb of the suppositional clause in the past perfect tense and that of the main clause in the conditional form. On the other hand, a hypothetical mode is often of non-past time. Since CSE often lacks any form of syntactic or semantic cues that signals the speaker’s shift to the hypothetical mode, it is difficult to determine whether the post-sekali utterance is indeed a hypothetical as opposed to a realis statement missing its tense marker. However, if one considers that the verb in the post-sekali statement cannot be expressed in the past and future tenses in addition to the fact that the speaker intends to express a non-true statement, the hypothetical reading becomes clear: *(27a) A: John didn’t buy any insurance when he went for holiday. B: Wah, sekali something happened to him when he was there. *(27b) A: John didn’t buy any insurance when he went for holiday. B: Wah, sekali something will happen to him when he’s there. If we assume that there is some correspondence between the counterfactual and the time of evaluation of the truth conditions of the proposition, the past tense cannot be interpreted inside the proposition of (27) since it constrains the accessible interpretations of temporality, shifting the time of evaluation of the counterfactual to some contextually salient past time while sekali, on the other hand, requires the time of evaluation to be after the point of utterance i.e. nonpast, therefore leading to a mismatch. This is true even without overt 26 grammatical markers in CSE. The modal will, despite being epistemic in nature, indicates the speaker’s confidence in his/her certainty of the proposition being true – meanings that cannot be expressed by a hypothetical. With the lack of grammatical indicators of hypotheticality, it is reasonable to assume that the main role of guiding the addressee towards the speaker’s intended meaning lies heavily on sekali as well as the addressee’s knowledge of the construction. That is, sekali marks the following utterance as an unexpected hypothetical scenario. The interaction of sekali with other constructions that are responsible for indicating possibility also lends strength to our claim of sekali functioning as a hypothetical marker; modals such as may and might cannot occur within the post-sekali statement, although modals in the preceding statement are acceptable: *(28a) John studied hard for his exam. Sekali he may/might fail. (28b) John may study hard for his exam. Sekali he fail. *(29a) Jane wore a mini skirt to school today. Sekali her lecturer may/might scold her for inappropriate dressing. (29b) Jane may wear a mini skirt to school today. Sekali her lecturer scold her for inappropriate dressing. A possible explanation for the phenomena highlighted in (28) and (29) could be made in terms of hypotheticality borne by sekali. That is, if one considers that sekali is already responsible for allowing the hypothetical to be expressed in the utterance, the presence of the modal may/might would cause a conflict with the semantics of sekali, since it indicates the speaker committing to the possibility of the event in the utterance happening, which conflicts with the 27 nature of the hypothetical as required by sekali. In addition, (28b) and (29b) further provides us with insights with regard to the scope of the hypothetical marker. As we can see, the scope of sekali extends only to the utterance following it. Even when the preceding utterance contains a modal indicating some form of possibility, the sekali utterance is still acceptable as what sekali refers to is the expectation borne by the preceding utterance, which does not change. Taking (28b) for instance, despite the presence of a modal, the expectation that accompanies the pre-sekali statement is exactly the same as that of (28a): John is expected to pass/do well in his exams. Because of this, the post-sekali statement is still acceptable, as the scenario of John failing the exams constitutes an unexpected event to the speakers. As a final note, expressing a counterfactual should not be confused with the act of lying. While lying constitutes a deliberate act of withholding the truth from the addressee, hence violating Grice’s (1975) Maxim of Quality, a counterfactual allows the addressee to infer the negation of reality from the expression of the irrealis (Ziegler, 2000: 16). In addition, while lying involves making a false assertion, the illocutionary force of a counterfactual is to make some form of prediction, which is a non-true assertion. 3.2.3 SEKALI AS A DISCOURSE CONNECTOR Now that some of the semantic properties of sekali have been discussed, I proceed to describe its distributional properties. Sekali can be treated as an adverbial discourse connector in CSE. Broadly defined, discourse connectors belong to a subset of discourse markers - expressions that are used to connect clause or sentence elements based on a particular meaning relationship 28 between the two (or more) elements. Common examples of connectors found in Standard English include thus, in contrast, however and in fact. A good deal of discussion in the literature has also centered on the issue of what discourse connectors actually connect (c.f. Rochota, 1996; Blakemore 1987; Sperber and Wilson 1995). Researchers involved in this discussion can be broadly segregated into two main schools of thought - the RelevanceTheoretic, and the Coherence-Based Schools, based on their views on communication and the subsequent consequences on how discourse connectors are viewed. I argue that the behavior of sekali aligns itself towards the claims put forward by the relevance-based approach. For the purposes of this thesis, I shall not be covering the two approaches in detail, but will instead focus on the main difference between the two that is relevant for our discussion of sekali. Coherence theorists suggest that connectives link two discourse units, usually understood as two consecutive clauses. Coherence is analyzable in terms of coherence relations – a set of implicit relations that bind/hold the texts together. Examples of these relations are CAUSE, EVIDENCE, ELABORATION, etc. and text comprehension depends on the recovery of such relations (Rochota, 1996). For Relevance theorists on the other hand, connectives link an utterance and a context that may be non-verbal in nature. The interpretation of an utterance is based on the assumption that the speaker aims to ensure that the intended interpretation is carried through as accurately as possible. As Blakemore (1987:77) suggests, a connective is a linguistic device that a speaker may use to direct his/her addressee to the intended interpretation of his/her utterance: 29 Their sole function is to guide the interpretation process by specifying certain properties of context and contextual effects. In a relevance-based framework, where the aim is to minimize processing costs, the use of such expressions is to be expected. Let us now turn to the properties of sekali. Sekali possesses several key properties that allow us to classify it as a discourse connector in CSE. The first is the fact that sekali does not interfere with the content meaning of each of the utterances it links. In a way, this is expected due to the fact that as a syntactic category, discourse connectives can only serve a single function in the discourse – in this case to coherently link two units of discourse together (Fraser, 1990). In line with Sperber and Wilson’s (1995) understanding of connectives discussed previously, we may understand sekali as linked to the inferential process of considering a hypothetical scenario contrary to the addressee’s expectations. Sekali also occurs utterance-initial. That being said, it should be noted that defining what constitutes an ‘utterance’ and hence what is utterance-initial is somewhat problematic. The examples in (30)- (31) illustrate this difficulty: (30) A: John is playing computer games in the office now. B: Sekali the boss catch him. (the boss catches him red-handed) (31) A: John is playing computer games in the office now. Sekali the boss catch him. While the claim that sekali is utterance-initial in (30) is generally unproblematic as it appears as the first unit of the second speaker’s utterance, the status of sekali in (31)- where only one speaker is involved- is admittedly less clear. However, this issue can be solved by considering instances which exhibit a noticeable break in the continuity of the utterance due to the presence of a non-linguistic unit (e.g. a cough or laughter), as illustrated in (32): 30 (32) A: John is playing computer games in the office now. Ha ha. sekali the boss catch him. In addition, in examples where the speaker immediately follows the first utterance with sekali and its following utterance without any prosodic pause, the example is unacceptable to respondents: (33) *A: John was playing computer games in the office today sekali the boss catch him. What the examples above suggest is that the observation of sekali being utterance initial holds true even for instances where the same speaker is responsible for both the pre and post-sekali statements. Examples such as (31) should be considered as two utterances, each separated by a prosodic pause, and are acceptable since sekali still occurs utterance initially. The unacceptability of (33), on the other hand, can be attributed to the fact that sekali is in the mid-utterance position, hence violating its distributional property. Examples (30)–(32) also highlight that sekali need not necessarily be used in response to an utterance made by another speaker. The same speaker who made the first statement can follow his/her own statement with a new utterance containing sekali, as long as sekali is used in an utterance initial position. This is typically realized using a prosodic pause or discourse device that differentiates it from utterances such as (33). Interestingly, this can be overruled when a subordinate conjunction but is introduced into the sentence: 31 (34) John and Mary hate each other now but sekali they fall in love. (35) Jack is planning to cheat in the exams but sekali he get caught. It should be noted that only but can be used this way. Other conjunctions do not appear with sekali: *(36) James is going to walk home by himself however sekali he get lost. *(37) James is going to walk home by himself and sekali he get lost. Bearing in mind that sekali in (36) and (37) are not utterance initial, the observations above may be explained using the semantics of sekali and but. But requires the second clause to be a denial of an expectation, similar to what sekali requires. At the same time, this denial of an expectation can be expressed in terms of a hypothetical. However, for other connectors such as so, and, although and however, an utterance referring to an unexpected consequence is not allowed for coherency to be maintained. In some instances, sekali can refer to the pragmatically unspoken context. When sekali is used in this manner, an overt utterance is not required for the sekali utterance to be understood by the interlocutors involved. Since the unspoken context should be readily accessible to both speakers at the time of speaking, it is not surprising that both interlocutors have to be physically present at the point of the utterance being made, or at least sharing the same visual context (such as watching the same television program at the same time), illustrated by (38) and (39): (38) Context: Two men are watching the final minutes of a soccer match. The score is currently 0-0 A: Sekali they last minute let in one goal. 32 (39) Context: Two people see a man count a stack of fifty-dollar bills in public A: sekali someone come and rob him of his money. In all instances of sekali being used in the manner described above, the unspoken context refers to a physical scenario that both interlocutors are currently experiencing at the point of speaking. In (38), the non-spoken context is the World Cup match that both interlocutors are watching. In this instance, both speakers are aware that the probability of a goal being scored during the final minutes of a soccer match is extremely low, but certainly plausible. The post-sekali remark is therefore legitimate as it refers to an unexpected outcome of the context at hand. Similarly, the A’s utterance in (39) is legitimate if the expectation is such that it is safe to count a huge amount of money openly in public. It should be noted at this point that both utterances in (38) and (39) are not only utterance-initial – they are also discourse initial. That is, they are the onset of intentional communication and there is no prior deliberate stimulus (for example another utterance or a gesture) intended to draw the speaker’s attention and that might cause a reaction on his/her part. Recalling the Coherence-Based approach, connectives connect two discourse units/parts (where ‘discourse unit’ is defined as an overt utterance), but the examples above clearly show that there is only one. In light of such examples, the Coherence-based approach is clearly unable to account for the motivation behind linguistic devices such as sekali that do not necessarily link a previous utterance. On the other hand, as one of the core aims of Relevance Theory is built around the idea of ‘facilitation’ - that the speaker wants to ensure that the 33 listener arrives at the intended interpretation (Sperber and Wilson, 1995), we are able to account for the behavior of sekali- in using sekali, the speaker indicates to the addressee how the following utterance should be interpreted – namely that what follows is a denial of expectations. This does not require the presence of an overt utterance. This is a strong argument towards considering not just sekali, but other discourse connectors that can refer to non-linguistic contexts as more inclined towards the Relevance-Based approach, especially since the Coherence-based approach does not make any claims for the motivation of discourse initial connectives. Lastly, a distinction should be made between instances of the type in (38) and (39) and the examples (21) and (23) (reproduced below as (40) – (41)) previously discussed in Section 3.2.1: (40) *A: John secretly took some money from his dad’s wallet last night. B: Sekali he fail his exams. (41) A: John secretly took some money from his dad’s wallet last night. B: Sekali he spend it all on gambling again. While sekali is used in (38) and (39) to refer to non-spoken contexts that are directly experienced by both interlocutors at the point of speaking, examples such as (40) and (41) are used in reference to a common base of knowledge that both speakers (are assumed to) share. As Clark and Marshall (1981:27) suggest, mutual knowledge is not a reality but an ideal people strive for because they want to avoid misunderstanding wherever possible. At the same time, speakers who intend an utterance to be interpreted in a particular way may expect the addressee to be able to supply a context that allows the interpretation to be uncovered. However, a mismatch between the context 34 envisaged by the speaker and one actually used by the hearer may result in misunderstanding, and in worse cases, a complete breakdown in communication. If hearers have not already realized that the context of the sekali proposition is somehow given by the non-linguistic context, there will be a possibility that they would accommodate (Lewis, 1979). The implication of this is that even uttering the post-sekali sentence in an ‘out of the blue’ fashion would simply cause hearers to expand their shared based of presuppositions. Returning to our example in (41), we employed a similar strategy in Section 3.2.1 to arrive at an acceptable reading of the post-sekali proposition, namely to assume that John must have had a gambling problem previously before stealing from his father, bearing in mind that there are limits to this. As I also mentioned previously, the retrieval of a relevant context hinges strongly on the addressee(s) knowledge of the world, in turn affecting the efficiency of which certain concepts are recovered as compared to others. 3.2.4 SEKALI AND HOW Sekali may also participate in some limited question formation. This is achieved by adding CSE how1 to the end of a legitimate post-sekali statement: (42) John left the house without bringing his keys. Sekali he get locked out how? (43) Susan went to the library this morning without her library card. Sekali the staff don’t allow her to borrow books how? 1 A distinction between CSE how and Standard English how should be made. While the Standard English how aims to elicit information about the way something was done, CSE how typically directs a question at the listener to approximately mean what are you going to do about this? I will discuss CSE how in detail in Chapter 5 35 By using how, the speaker expresses the post-sekali utterance as a ‘quandary’, in turn inviting the addressee to provide a possible solution if the hypothetical event does indeed happen. One can indeed draw a parallel between how and the Standard English conditional question such as what if… or what should you/we do if… (44a) A: My five-year-old son went to school by himself today. B: Sekali he get lost how? A: He has a hand phone, so he will be able to call me. (44b) A: My five-year-old son went to school by himself today. B: Sekali he get lost. A: He has a hand phone, so he will be able to call me. While it appears that the third utterance in (44a) is a response elicited by the question formed by how, (44b) shows that it is also possible to provide the same response to a sekali-utterance that does not contain how. This raises the question of whether the question created by how is aimed at eliciting an answer, or whether the answers demonstrated in (44a) and (44b) are optional conversational replies by the listener. If we agree that how functions primarily as a question marker and the speaker expects the listener to share his sentiment about the quandary, then the sekali-how utterance would necessarily require a reply of some sort. Indeed, there is some sense that the use of sekali in (44b) (and the non-interrogative examples in this thesis) is somewhat rhetorical in nature and does not expect a reply other than to indicate the speaker’s attempt at expressing unexpectedness. Besides being a question marker, the insertion of how carries the implicature that the hypothetical event is not only unexpected – it is also undesirable to the speaker. Consider the following examples: 36 (45a) Jane wants very much to get married Jane: I think John is not going to marry me. B: Sekali he proposes to you tomorrow. (45b) *Jane wants very much to get married Jane: I think John is not going to marry me. B: Sekali he proposes to you tomorrow how? (45c) Jane does not want to get married Jane: I think John is not going to marry me. B: Sekali he proposes to you tomorrow how? (46a) A and B hate John Jane: I think John is destined to be poor all his life. B: Sekali he strike lottery how? (46b) *A and B like John Jane: I think John is destined to be poor all his life. B: Sekali he strike lottery how? The examples show that sekali-how can only be used if the proposition it puts forward is something that is undesired by the interlocutors. This is true even if the event is generally recognized as positive for the recipient of the action/event. For instance, receiving an unexpected windfall from a lottery win is generally perceived as a positive event, yet it cannot be used in (46b) with how to show that the speakers are happy that John’s situation has made a turn for the better; it can only be used in the scenario that both interlocutors dislike John and do not desire him to receive that unexpected windfall. On a similar reasoning, the possibility of John proposing in (45c) is not only unexpected, it is also undesirable for Jane who does not want to get married. While how exists independently in CSE to form questions, in many instances where the unexpected scenario is adverse in nature, there was a high correspondence of sekali and how used together. The reason for this could be that how lends some form of pragmatic/conversational property to the sekali utterance that speakers find useful to employ. In fact, the noted frequency is 37 high enough that from the viewpoint of CG, this repeated use of sekali and how together may well be considered as a new construction - a sekali-how construction - that serves a more narrow range of function of expressing adverse unexpected events, unlike sekali, which appears unspecified for adversity. Although sekali can occur independently of how, it is possible that the sekali-how construction is a relatively new phenomenon and will continue to grow in strength as its place in the CSE repertoire becomes more and more robust, possibly even resulting in the decline of the sekali or how constructions. Nevertheless, the observation above suggests a high level of compatibility between the two constructions such that they can be readily used in conjunction with one another. The above being said, it is important to bear in mind the implications that arise with regard to CG. Since constructions are viewed as form-meaning parings, the most important question that arises is whether the resulting construction reflects a meaning that is compositionally more than the sum of its parts. That is, does the sekali-how construction contain its own unique properties that cannot be derived from understanding how and sekali independently, or does it reflect a situation where the properties of how are applied to a legitimate sekali utterance? If the former is true, the presence of both sekali and how should lead to a corresponding difference in meaning – one that is not observed in a regular sekali and how utterance. While the Usage-Based model of grammar (See Section 2.3.1) allows for redundancy in constructions, such a finding will certainly be interesting for the purposes of a greater understanding of the sekali construction. Because the answer to this question cannot be attempted without an in-depth study of how, I have decided to dedicate a chapter to 38 understand the how construction in detail. In doing so, not only will I be able to better understand the compatibility between the two constructions as mentioned in the previous paragraph, I will also be able to present a more detailed discussion of the nature of the proposed construction. I present my findings of how in Chapter 5. 3.3 SEKALI AND ADVERSITY Based on its interaction with the how construction, it is appropriate to discuss the relationship between the sekali construction and adversity. From what we have seen in this chapter, it is reasonable to conclude that the sekali construction should be treated as being unspecified for adversity. While it is true that sekali is frequently used in contexts where the post-sekali utterance is used as some form of ‘warning’ to the addressee of something unpleasant that may possibly happen, this does not rule out instances where sekali may be used to describe events that are clearly neutral and/or good for the subject of the utterance. As long as the second utterance describes a plausible unexpected scenario that is relevant to the first utterance or non-linguistic context, it may be used with sekali. 3.4 POLYSEMY IN SEKALI While the judgments elicited from the respondents in the examples so far are largely uncontested, suggesting that the speakers possess an implicit understanding of the conditions required to form a grammatical sekali utterance, there is a particular sense of sekali (henceforth referred to as sekali2) that appears to be used in a different manner from what we have discussed so 39 far. Below are some actual examples taken from conversations between several middle-aged speakers of CSE: (47) They were saying that the new boss is very short. Sekali2 he walk/walked/*walks in he is taller than all of them. (They were saying that the new boss is very short. When he walked in he was taller than all of them) (48) We were talking bad about Meiqi. Sekali2 she walk/walked/*walks in. (We were gossiping about her and she suddenly walked in) (49) We never book a place for him. Sekali2 he really come/came/*comes. (We didn’t reserve a seat for him. However, he really came) Several preliminary observations can be made. Unlike what we have discussed about sekali so far, the examples highlighted in (47)-(49) show that the postsekali2 utterance is not a hypothetical. Despite the lack of overt tense markings, all the examples refer to a completed event that follows after the event in the preceding utterance. To further elaborate on this, sekali2 typically appears in narratives, in which the speaker expresses a past event where the involved parties’ expectations were defied by the event that happened in the post-sekali2 utterance. To take (47) for example, that the boss was taller than all the workers given the context where the staff were expecting him to be short is contrary to expectations. In (48), gossiping about a particular individual comes with the implication that the person is not present (and may not be expected to be in the future), hence the fact that the target of the gossip appeared is unexpected. Therefore, despite some differences such as the presence of the realis statement after sekali2, the construction still deals with expressing some form of unexpectedness. 40 (47) – (49) also show that besides being a realis statement, the second utterances all refer to a past event. This is expected, since this particular sense of sekali2 is used in situations where one speaker recounts an event to his/her addressee which manifests in the kind of tense that is allowed with the postsekali2 utterance – while an overt past tense marking is not required, the use of the present tense in the second utterance is not allowed as it may invoke a hypothetical interpretation i.e. the sense typically signified by sekali, which is not the meaning intended by the speaker. The fact that the use of the past tense is acceptable in expressing the same meaning as the utterance without the overt tense marking further attests to the above observation. Finally, there is a sense of immediacy when sekali2 is used in the manner described above. That is, the post- sekali2 event must follow ‘soon after’ the preceding event. To understand this, the examples below show various judgments based on the time lapse between the pre and the post- sekali2 events: (50a) We were talking bad about Meiqi. Sekali2 she walk in. (We were gossiping about her and she walked in) (50b) ? We were talking bad about Meiqi. Sekali2 she walk in five minutes later. (We were gossiping about her and she walked in five minutes later) (50c) *We were talking bad about Meiqi. Sekali2 she walk in after lunch. (We were gossiping about her and she walked in after lunch) (50a)-(50c) show that if considerable time has lapsed between the first event and the post-sekali one, the coherence relationship between the two utterances weakens. Indeed, the examples clearly show that most speakers possess some kind of mental threshold of what may be considered ‘soon after’ with regards 41 to sekali2. From (50b) we can see that 5 minutes is an area of contention, where almost half of the respondents found it acceptable while the other half did not. At the same time, a lapse of a few hours between the events was unanimously rejected. From the examples above, sekali2 behaves similarly to other temporal discourse connectors such as suddenly in Standard English that connect a sequence of events temporally based on its relative sequence in the sentence, with the added implicature that the second event is somewhat unexpected. I noted at the beginning of the section that the examples in (47)-(49) were observed in middle-aged speakers. To further investigate this observation, I conducted a separate judgment elicitation exercise using the recognition of sekali and sekali2 as the independent variables and two age groups of CSE speakers as the dependent variable. The results showed that the distinction and recognition of sekali and sekali2 can indeed be segregated along a generation line as sekali2 appears to be available only to middle-aged (approximately 35 years and above) speakers - for speakers between the age group of 20-35 years old, instances of sekali2 in use is uncommon, if not non-existent. In contrast, the acceptability of the examples such as those in (47)-(49) were robust among older speakers of CSE. It should be mentioned that both groups of speakers accepted sekali, sharing consistent judgments with regard to the examples found in previous sections of this thesis, suggesting that the use of sekali is the more widespread one between the two senses. In the light of these observations, I argue that sekali is best treated as polysemous, having two different senses. As noted by Fillmore and Atkins 42 (2000), the various senses of polysemous constructions are typically derived from a central origin and are related with one another through a conceptual ‘network’. For the case of sekali, the central meaning that both senses share have to do with how speakers express an unexpected event. The first sense is commonly found in the speech repertoire of all CSE speakers and is discussed extensively in this thesis. It expresses unexpectedness through presenting a hypothetical scenario that denies the speaker(s)’ expectations, and may be used in a large number of discourse situations, including commenting about a non-linguistic context. The second is only used in narratives where the individuals involved experienced some form of unexpectedness. The fact that the two senses of sekali can be distinguished along different generation groups of speakers hints at some form of language shift over time. Sekali2 is likely to have been an ‘older’ form and therefore used by an earlier generation of speakers. The emergence of the more commonly recognized sense of sekali, on the other hand, is the product of language change, indicated by the fact that the younger generations of speakers possess only this version in their speech repertoire. This is probably due to the gradual decline in the use of sekali2 among the older generation itself in light of the newer sekali construction. In fact, if one further considers that sekali originates as a lexical item in the Malay Language to mean ‘one time’, the sekali construction may be situated within a wider context of historical language change. It is likely that sekali is first borrowed from Malay and undergoes change into sekali2, which then undergoes further change and becomes increasingly hypothetical to produce the sekali that I study in this thesis. This is not to say that only two senses of sekali has resulted from this meaning change – indeed, there may be 43 more senses of sekali that may have remained largely undetected due to their relatively low frequency of use at the point of the writing of this thesis. Since sekali gradually loses its lexical meaning and takes on a more grammatical function (as a discourse connector) in CSE, it appears that sekali presents us with a case of grammaticalization (Hopper and Traugott, 2003). While a discussion of sekali from the point of view of the grammaticalization framework is certainly important to our understanding of the construction, the central aim of this chapter is to outline the various properties of the sekali construction. In light of this, I have decided to dedicate the next chapter to address this topic in greater detail. 3.5 SUMMARY In this chapter, I described the sekali construction in terms of its semantic and distributional properties. By showing that it can refer to the unspoken context and occur discourse initially, I argued that sekali’s function within the CSE repertoire is that of a Relevance-Based discourse connective. In addition, I noted a high frequency of instances where sekali is used with the how construction to produce a question that expresses some form of adversity, suggesting the possibility of a separate sekali-how construction. Finally, I presented two polysemous senses of sekali. Of the two, one sense is exclusively possessed by the older generation of speakers. Considering its origins in the Malay language, I suggested that sekali in CSE presents us with a case of grammaticalization, where sekali undergoes borrowing from Malay to form sekali2, which eventually changes to form the sekali construction studied in this thesis. As the primary aim of this chapter is to understand the properties of sekali, I have refrained from discussing in detail both sekali’s 44 relationship with the how construction as well as its development from the point of view of grammaticalization- both important aspects that will allow us to gain a deeper understanding of the sekali construction. Because of this, I have decided to dedicate Chapter 4 to discuss sekali as a grammaticalized construction, followed by a detailed analysis of how in Chapter 5. 45 CHAPTER 4 SEKALI AND GRAMMATICALIZATION 4.1 INTRODUCTION In Chapter 3, I showed that sekali contains two polysemous senses, with one sense of the construction, sekali2 exclusively employed by an older generation of speakers to express unexpected past events. In addition to the fact that sekali originates in the Malay Language, I suggested that sekali may be understood within a wider context of language change using grammaticalization in CSE. This chapter thus aims to further this discussion where the previous chapter left off by providing a discussion of sekali from the point of view of Grammaticalization Theory. I first provide the reader with a broad overview of the framework, followed by a brief discussion on the compatibility of Grammaticalization Theory and CG in Sections 4.2 and 4.3 respectively. Next, Sekali is presented as a grammaticalized construction in Section 4.4. Finally in Section 4.5, I discuss the effect of substrate influences on the properties of sekali in CSE. It should be mentioned that the aim of this chapter is not to commit the current thesis to Grammaticalization Theory. Instead, this chapter aims to present additional insights on sekali that CG may not be as well equipped to discuss, especially with regard to the role of substrate influences on the formation of sekali. As such, this chapter does not take a concrete position that sekali has indeed undergone grammaticalization and any such claims should be treated as speculative in nature. Grammaticalization Theory was chosen due to its compatibility with CG (see Section 4.3) and its ability to accommodate 46 speculative remarks about sekali from a cross cultural perspective, allowing us a more nuanced understanding of the construction as a whole. 4.2 GRAMMATICALIZATION The term ‘grammaticalization’ refers to both a framework as well as the phenomena that it is concerned with. As a framework, it is one that is concerned about grammatical constructions and how they are formed, used and how they affect the language as a whole. On the other hand, the term ‘grammaticalization’ also refers to the concept that the framework aims to express, especially where lexical items evolve into more grammatical ones and existing grammatical items take on even more grammatical functions (Heine, 2003; Hopper and Traugott, 2003; Traugott, 2003). To prevent any confusion between the two terms, I will refer to the Grammaticalization framework as GT (Grammaticalization Theory), while ‘grammaticalization’ will be used to refer to the process of language change. Underlying our understanding of GT is the Unidirectionality Hypothesis. Simply put, the Unidirectionality Hypothesis argues that grammaticalization works in one direction and is irreversible. This does not mean that linguistic change will indeed occur in all cases, but if it does, it occurs in a lexical to grammatical direction and not the other way round. Although there have been several counterexamples to this claim, most of the scholars on the subject recognize this hypothesis as an important feature of grammaticalization (see Heine and Reh 1984: 95; Traugott and Heine 1991: 4–6; Hopper and Traugott 2003 [1993]; Haspelmath, 1999). Central to the framework of 47 grammaticalization is the question of whether boundaries between grammatical categories are discrete and if so, the extent to which they are. More specifically, Heine (2003) suggests that grammaticalization may be characterized by several key features: i. ii. iii. iv. desemanticization (or “bleaching”, semantic reduction): loss in meaning content extension (or context generalization): use in new contexts decategorialization: loss in morphosyntactic properties characteristic of the source forms, including the loss of independent word status (cliticization, affixation) erosion (or “phonetic reduction”), that is, loss in phonetic substance (Heine, 2003: 580) These mechanisms are interrelated ones in that they affect each other’s progress in the event of grammaticalization. In addition to that, it should be noted though that these mechanisms are only indicative of grammaticalization and grammaticalization can take place even without these “noticeable pragmatic, morphosyntactic, or phonetic changes” (Heine 2003: 580). In addition, while Hopper (1991) elaborates on some principles of grammaticalization in a similar fashion, he presents additional concepts of ‘layering’, ‘divergence’, ‘specialization’ and ‘persistence’ that might accompany the aforementioned observed mechanisms of grammaticalization. Occurrences of grammaticalization have often been viewed as taking place over long periods of time, having its roots in historical studies of language (Heine, 2003). Implicit in this is the idea that grammaticalization involves a great deal of typification of a given construction over time. However, the case of contact languages presents a unique situation where this process seems to be sped up. Bruyn (1996), in her work, examines this 48 situation where creoles2 grammaticalize at a faster rate than non-creole languages. She focuses on the creole Sranan, a Surinamese creole with English as its lexifier and she attributes this speed to the pressure to communicate in the contact situations, as well as the “discontinuity in [the] transmission” of the superstrate language. Bruyn additionally draws a distinction between the grammaticalization of creole and non-creole languages in the way creole grammaticalizations are “crucially determined by influence” from the substrate languages. According to her, it is this substrate influence that makes grammaticalization in creoles a different (and speedier) one from non-creole languages. In fact, particular forms may sometimes be adopted even though there is no apparent functional need. Care therefore needs to be taken in relating these grammaticalizations in creoles to their superstrate and substrate languages, because they may not go through the same processes or undergo the same pragmatic motivations as their counterparts in the non-Creole languages. Nevertheless, we can take away the point that grammaticalization in creoles are largely influenced by their super- and substrate language to a significant extent. 4.3 COMPATIBILITY OF GT AND CG Broadly speaking, the idea that lexical items undergo grammaticalization does not present any conflict to the assumptions of CG. After all, morphemes and words are considered as constructions in CG. In addition, the compatibility of the two frameworks is further demonstrated by evidence in the literature 2 We may heuristically equate this with ‘contact languages’ for the purposes of this thesis. 49 showing that is not only single words that become functional over time but also multi-lexical items, such as sort of and kind of as discussed in Tabor (1994) as well as Hopper and Traugott’s (2003) example of Old English pa hwile pe ‘that time that’ > hwile ‘while’ (a temporal connective) and Standard English let us > let’s. Noël (2007) identifies another reason, directing our attention to Hopper and Traugott’s (2003:18) use of the term constructions in their definition of grammaticalization: “the change whereby lexical items and constructions come in certain linguistic contexts to serve grammatical functions and, once grammaticalized, continue to develop new grammatical functions”. By his interpretation, Noël suggests that grammaticalized items are not isolated units in their own right, but necessarily situated within a “morphosyntactic context”, which plays a huge part in the process of grammaticalization. This suggests that many lexical items that are thought to be a subject of change should actually be treated as part of larger units of meaning, in other words – constructions. The above being said, before any discussion of grammaticalization of constructions may proceed, two main issues need to be kept in mind. The first is that there needs to be an agreement that the construction involved (in this case, sekali) is a grammatical construction. From the point of view of CG, this is a non-issue: if it is a construction, it is part of the grammar. For GT on the other hand, grammaticalization entails a semantic change towards a more grammatical meaning. The question then rises of which meanings count as grammatical. As Hopper and Traugott (2003:24) state, “how far we shall be 50 prepared to extend the notion of ‘grammaticalization’ will be determined by the limits of our understanding of what it means for a construction to be ‘grammatical’ or have a grammatical function.” For the purposes of this thesis, I will treat a ‘grammatical construction’ as a construction that does not have any impact on the truth-value of the statement. Under this definition, sekali, which functions primarily as a discourse connector and hypothetical marker, qualifies as a grammatical construction. The second condition that needs to be met is whether the alterations the construction goes through correspond to the changes identified in GT as being constitutive of grammaticalization. As I presented to the reader in Section 4.2, Heine’s (2003:579) and Hopper’s (1991) list of “mechanisms” involved in grammaticalization conveniently serves as a convenient starting point from which we may aim to address this issue. By comparing the change of sekali over time to the mechanisms laid out by Heine and Hopper, we may be able to determine whether grammaticalization has indeed taken place. These two issues will be addressed in the following section. 4.4 SEKALI AND GRAMMATICALIZATION To begin our discussion on the grammaticalization of the sekali construction, let us first briefly understand its origins. One may trace the origins of sekali to the Malay Language as spoken in the region, also known as Bahasa Melayu. In Malay, sekali is a compound word made up of the morphemes se- (one) and –kali (time). The following examples show sekali as used in the Malay Language: 51 (51) Saya akan bantu awak sekali lagi. 1st PER will help you one time more. ‘I will help you one more time.’ (52) Saya akan pergi ke sana sekali sahaja. 1st PER will go over there one time only. ‘I will go there once only.’ (53) Saya hanya mampu bekerja sekali seminggu 1st PER only afford work one time week. ‘I am only able to work once a week’ As we may see from the above examples, sekali in Malay functions predominantly as a predicate adverb, having a very specific semantics of indicating the frequency of a state of affairs described by the verb. In fact, as the construction is a compound, the –kali morpheme may be attached to other counting nouns to indicate the number of times an action occurs e.g. sekali (one time), duakali (two times), etc. Recalling our discussion of CSE sekali in Chapter 3, it is clear that the original meaning of ‘one time’ is lost in CSE. This is compounded by the fact that there is no morphological distinction between se- and –kali, such that sekali is treated as a single unit of meaning, arguably because repeated use has led to the fossilization of the construction. In addition, sekali no longer functions as a predicate adverb. As I discussed in the previous chapter, sekali in CSE is a discourse connective – serving a more grammatical function of connecting two units of discourse in terms of a coherence relationship. This presents a strong case towards the claim that sekali has undergone grammaticalization since there has been a shift from a more lexical category to a grammatical one, coupled with some evidence of semantic bleaching as sekali appears to lose some of its expressivity during the transition from Malay to CSE. That being 52 said, one may argue on the other hand, that sekali does gain pragmatic strength in the process since it gains an additional function of implicating to the addressee that the post-sekali utterance is unexpected, an aspect of use that was not present in the source version of the construction. Furthering our discussion, GT may be used to provide insights on how this property of expressing ‘unexpectedness’ might have developed during the process of grammaticalization. Traugott (1982) recognizes that although grammaticalization often involves a meaning shift from the propositional to the expressive or textual, it is “more likely to involve” a change from “less personal to more personal”, with “more personal” pertaining to the construction being “more anchored in the context of the speech act, particularly the speaker’s orientation to situation, text, and interpersonal relations” (Traugott 1982: 253). More specifically, Langacker builds on Traugott’s (1988: 410) observation that in grammaticalization “meanings tend to become increasingly situated in the speaker’s subjective belief/attitude toward the situation”. In agreement with what Traugott and Langacker have noted, the shift of meaning has moved sekali from the realm of general use (as a lexical item) to that of informal spoken discourse. Indeed, the use of sekali (and sekali-how) is typically not used in formal speech situations to express the meaning that the speaker intends; doing so would be deemed as socially inappropriate. Also, as I demonstrated in Chapter 3, the unexpectedness that is expressed by the construction is very much speaker-centered, and dependent on the speaker’s perspective towards the pre-sekali proposition, aligning my findings with the observations that Langacker has laid out. 53 In addition, while sekali in Malay is pronounced as [sekali], the CSE counterpart is more frequently pronounced as [skali], indicating the presence of phonetic reduction. This is a reasonable product of grammaticalization, if one begins with the assumption that constructions are borrowed into the language for their usefulness. The usefulness of a construction in expressing meaning will lead to a corresponding increase in the frequency of its usage and its predictability in conversations. As Haspelmath (1999) argues, the more predictable the construction, the less phonetically salient the construction has to be, allowing speakers some leeway to use a “slurred” pronunciation (hence applying the maxim of economy) because the risk of misunderstanding (i.e. violating the maxim of clarity) is not high. In fact, when [sekali] was deliberately used in place of [skali], several respondents were unable to understand/form a grammatical interpretation of the examples, suggesting that the distinction is fairly salient to speakers of CSE and a central factor of their knowledge of the construction. From the above discussion, one can certainly conclude that sekali has certainly grammaticalized, having made the transition from its original use as predicate adverb ‘one time’ in Malay to an adverbial discourse connector and a hypothetical marker. In a way, it has been desemanticized out of its ‘lower’ role as a predicate adverb and appears to be moving along a cline towards that of a discourse marker. Given that sekali is largely adverbial in nature, it appears to follow a common grammaticalization pathway, where Chao (1976 cited in Ziegeler, 2000) similarly observes that the use of adverbs and modals can contribute to the raising of the hypotheticality of the situation. Sekali appears to also have been extended in its functions since it has now acquired 54 this added adverbial function of expressing unexpectedness in CSE. On a related note, one can certainly also argue that sekali has undergone decategoricalization since it no longer holds its original morphosyntactic properties as a predicate modifier. Despite this, the older and relatively more lexical meaning of ‘one time’ in Malay still exists independently while the CSE sekali’s use as a discourse connector continues to proliferate. Under this observation, one can certainly say that sekali appears to present a situation of ‘divergence’ (Hopper, 1991) where CSE sekali has diverged along a different path and grammaticalized while its original form in Malay retains the initial meanings, and using the CSE sense of sekali in Malay would be considered ungrammatical according to its formal rules. At the same time, some form of ‘persistence’ (Hopper, 1991) is observed. To a certain extent, the properties that we have observed in sekali suggest that it operates within its historical constraints through its continued adverbial nature (as opposed to a move towards becoming a possessive marker, for example). There is therefore still a sense of persistence of the old form’s morphosyntactic constraints in CSE sekali even though it has diverged from the initial Malay form. Being a grammaticalized form, the ‘loss-and-gain model’ (Heine, 2003) appears to be the most accurate description of what sekali is likely to have undergone (and perhaps still is undergoing) during the process of language change. Under this model, sekali can be described as gaining more pragmatic strength despite having lost the meanings of ‘one time’ in CSE. In other words, the case of sekali is like one involving an ‘invited inference’ (Traugott, 55 2003) where sekali gains a strong hypothetical meaning through the conventionalizing of a conversational implicature, even though its constituent morphemes bear no hint of that meaning at all. The above being said, I would like to argue that what we observe in sekali is the result of many cycles of grammaticalization. That is, it is highly likely that the meaning shift comprises of a series of gradual changes beginning from the point where sekali is borrowed into the CSE repertoire up to the version that widely proliferates in CSE today. The main evidence that suggests this comes from the case of sekali2 (see Chapter 3.2.6). That the knowledge and use of sekali2 is only restricted to the older generation of speakers is particularly suggestive that this sense of sekali was used before the more common sense of sekali was formed. After undergoing change to the current sense of sekali, the older sense of sekali2 was gradually forgotten and made obsolete from lack of use, remaining only to the (older) generation who are aware of its existence and use. Similarly, one can arrive at the same hypothesis from the observation that sekali2 similarly expresses unexpectedness, yet does not force a hypothetical interpretation on the post-sekali utterance. This strongly suggests that the hypotheticality may have developed during a later stage of the grammaticalization process, making sekali2 the ‘transition point’ before this change occurs. In sum, the process of grammaticalization for sekali may be proposed as such: sekali is first borrowed from Malay into CSE, and loses its ‘one time’ meaning and becomes sekali2 while retaining its adverbial function to express some form of unexpectedness. Finally, the construction undergoes more change, resulting in an increased sense of hypotheticality and forming the sense of sekali as analyzed in this thesis. 56 4.5 SUBSTRATE INFLUENCES ON SEKALI Interestingly, the use of sekali at the head of the utterance bears great functional similarity to the Mandarin hypothetical marker, ruguo (‘if’), although it should be mentioned that an utterance of this kind in Mandarin would typically be followed by the question marker zhe me ban (loosely translated to what should you/we do): (54) Ru guo Xiao Ming bu ji ge zhe me ban? If Xiao Ming fail what do ‘What should you/we do if Xiao Ming fails?’ As pointed out earlier, grammaticalization in contact languages is largely influenced by the presence of its superstrate and substrate languages. The situation of CSE is unique in that the linguistic environment consists of more than two main languages in constant contact, comprising of Standard Singapore English, Chinese3 and Malay. Sekali appears to be influenced by these languages as the use of sekali as a hypothetical marker appears to parallel the way hypotheticals are expressed with Mandarin’s ruguo. This claim is further strengthened if we consider that Mandarin hypothetical questions such as the type in (54) are highly similar to the sekali-how construction, demonstrated in (55), with sekali and how replacing ruguo and zhe me ban respectively: (55) Sekali Xiao Ming fail his exams how? While sekali certainly has its source in Malay, the acceptability of the sentences suggests that its use in the grammar of CSE is probably influenced 3 I use ‘Chinese’ as an umbrella term to refer to all dialects, including Mandarin. 57 by the grammar of Chinese spoken in Singapore. This finding is interesting, not just because we have managed to argue for the influence of Mandarin in sekali, but because we are presented with a possible origin point for the sekalihow construction. Following this reasoning, we may posit that how is in fact the CSE counterpart of Mandarin zhe me ban under the context as observed in (54). If we recognize the distinct possibility that how is indeed the result of the influence of substrate Mandarin, then it is not surprising why despite sharing the same form with Standard English how, the semantics of CSE how is such that it appears to elicit some form of solution for a situation/quandary (see Chapter 5.3). The how construction may in fact be borrowed such that speakers are able to express the same kinds of meanings from Mandarin constructions in CSE, making it the desire for expressiveness that motivates the process of borrowing and subsequently, grammaticalization (Meillet, 1992 cited in McMahon, 1994). In sum, the use of the grammaticalized form sekali certainly appears to be one sensitive to aspects of socialization as much as it is cognitively influenced by the unique grammar systems that individuals have. Indeed, Matas and Sekel (2007) also note in their paper that language changes such as these crucially depend on the “sociolinguistic conditions of the speech community” (860). This means issues like the standardization of a language and the control of its use, the presentation of a language as prestigious or not and a person’s knowledge of other languages inevitably affect how a language develops. A heartfelt consideration of a language’s and its speakers’ social conditions would certainly do well in understanding the developments of the language better. 58 4.6 SUMMARY In this chapter, I presented sekali as the product of grammaticalization from a predicate adverb sekali in Malay having the meaning of ‘one time’. I showed that sekali exhibits several classic features of grammaticalization including semantic bleaching, phonological reduction and change of function towards a more grammatical category of an adverbial discourse connector. These changes in sekali can be explained more accurately by the Loss and Gain Model, where sekali loses some aspect of its original meaning while gaining some additional (grammatical) functions after being borrowed into CSE. In addition, by briefly comparing the properties of Mandarin’s hypothetical construction ruguo-zhe me ban to the sekali-how construction, I posited that the substrate language of Mandarin played an important role in influencing the grammatical properties of the subsequent sekali (and how) construction. In the next chapter, I discuss the how construction and present my insights on its relationship with sekali. 59 CHAPTER 5 THE HOW CONSTRUCTION 5.1 INTRODUCTION During my discussion of sekali, I noted a high frequency of sekali and how occurring together in the CSE speech repertoire. In doing so, I argued that the frequent pairing of the two constructions might possibly result in a new – sekali-how - construction. Nevertheless, that the two constructions are often used together suggests some semantic/pragmatic compatibility between them and understanding how will ultimately be useful in helping us understand sekali better. This chapter provides an in-depth discussion of the how construction and attempts to draw further insights on the sekali construction I established in Chapter 3. I begin by first drawing a brief distinction between how as an interrogative in CSE and Standard English in Section 5.2. This is followed by a discussion of the semantic and distributional properties of the construction in Sections 5.3 to 5.6. Section 5.7 will discuss how’s interaction with other discourse connectives. Finally, I consolidate the discussion started back in Chapter 3 and return to the sekali-how construction in Section 5.8. I show that how is primarily used to express a quandary, and in doing so, questions the addressee to provide details of how a quandary can be resolved. 5.2 HOW AS AN INTERROGATIVE Before I outline the semantic and distributional properties of the construction, I would like to bring the reader’s attention to the distinction between CSE and Standard English how. Although CSE how shares the same form as the whword how in Standard English, I will assume a distinction between how in CSE and Standard English how in this thesis. The reason for treating CSE how 60 as a separate construction lies in its high frequency of usage as well as its distinct differences in its syntactic distribution and semantics from Standard English how. The rest of this chapter will therefore not focus on outlining the differences between both how constructions, but specifically on understanding CSE how. References will still be made to Standard English how insofar as they enable us to shed light on the properties of CSE how. How in Standard English is an interrogative word, more commonly known as a wh word. It appears at the sentence initial position to form an interrogative: (55) A: How did John cut the cake? B: He (John) cut the cake with a knife. An interrogative formed with Standard English how is broadly understood to be seeking information about the way by which an action is performed. Typically, this information corresponds to that typically expressed by a PP such as with a knife, in the case of example (55). In contrast, CSE how appears in the clause final position in an interrogative. It is not possible for how to appear in the clause initial position to preserve the (CSE) meaning intended by the speaker: (56) a.*How John is coming? (In what manner/method is John coming?) b. John is coming how? (Gloss: John is coming. What are you/we going to do about it?) While there is no SUBJ AUX inversion in (56a), the sentence is acceptable in CSE. However, the question is understood to be the same as its how interrogative counterpart in Standard English. Conversely, question types such as (56b) are recognized in CSE but not in Standard English. 61 The first observation that may be made is that speakers of CSE are able to recognize which how meaning is intended based on its relative position in the clause: speakers unambiguously recognize that the only reading derivable from (56a) is the intention of the speaker to seek information about the means by which John will come, i.e. the Standard English interpretation. On the other hand, (56b) can only refer to the event of John coming being expressed as a quandary through the use of how. What follows from the above discussion is that the kind of information CSE how aims to elicit from the listener is different from its Standard English counterpart. CSE how aims to elicit information from the addressee about what he did/is going to do about the given the quandary at hand (see Section 4.3 for a more detailed discussion on the semantics of how). As the distributional properties of CSE how corresponds to an interpretation that is almost unrecognizable Standard English how, I will argue that CSE how may be considered as an independent construction in its own right. While having an emotive element of expressing some form of unexpectedness and undesirability, CSE how still functions as an interrogative marker since a response is expected from the addressee. 5.3 EXPRESSING A QUANDARY As previously mentioned, how is used to express a quandary. The examples below show more instances of the how construction in use (contexts framing the exchanges are in italics): (57) Child drops a glass cup on the floor and it breaks Mother: how? 62 (58) A: I forgot to bring my wallet today. I should be able to survive the day with the ten dollars I have in my pocket. B: You don’t have enough money to spend how? (59) One speaker poses a dare to his friend A: I dare you to lie down in the middle of the shopping mall. B: And if I actually do it how? A: Well I’ll treat you to lunch then. In (57), the mother uses how as a way of asking her child what he/she is planning to do about the broken cup. This is done with the intention of reprimanding the child for doing something that he/she should not have done. In (58), despite the fact that speaker A has ten dollars with him (and is sure that he will be able to survive the day with that amount of money), speaker B identifies the possibility that A might still not have enough money to spend (perhaps in the event that A needs to buy something expensive). Finally in (59), B expresses that the scenario of him doing the dare is problem to A, and thus asks A what he would do in the event that the dare was actually done. What the three examples above have in common is that in using how, a quandary is expressed by the speaker. The utterance that immediately precedes how is framed as a particularly problematic scenario. In addition, the how construction aims to ask the addressee for a solution to the quandary. Broadly paraphrased, how in CSE carries the approximate meaning of what are you going to do about X/ what will you do if X happens. More needs to be said about the nature of the quandary expressed by how. Firstly, with the exception of instances such as (57) where how is used independent of any accompanying proposition, the how-utterance takes the form of a hypothetical. Since I previously discussed how to identify a hypothetical from other non-true assertions in my study of sekali, I shall 63 refrain from repeating my analysis here, suffice to say that the speaker in making the how utterance is unaware of the truth of the proposition, and neither is he/she able to commit his/her confidence in the possibility of the event happening. All that is expressed with how is a quandary that may potentially occur given the context of speech. Because the nature of a hypothetical is such that even the speaker cannot commit to the facts of the proposition, there is a strong sense of unexpectedness following the interpretation of the how utterance. To take (58) for example, the contextual implication that arises from the scenario is that speaker A would have money to get through the day. The scenario where A does not have enough money to spend is therefore unexpected, although certainly not implausible. In (59), dares are (typically) made with the expectation that the addressee will not be able to perform the action. By this reasoning, the context itself indicates that the hypothetical scenario that speaker A replies about completing the dare is unexpected. 5.4 HOW USED INDEPENDENTLY Recall example (57) (reproduced as (60) for the reader’s convenience). How can be used to form an interrogative independent of an accompanying proposition: (60) Child drops a glass cup on the floor and it breaks. Mother: how? How used independently is typically used in response to a previous utterance or a common non-linguistic context framing the current exchange. Having no utterance accompanying how, it cannot highlight a hypothetical event as a quandary. Because of this, it does not perform the same function of framing a 64 scenario as a quandary based on the speaker’s point of view, as what we discussed in the previous section. Instead, I would like to argue that in using how in this manner, the speaker assumes that the addressee is also aware of the quandary at the point of utterance. This is illustrated by an actual instance where a breakdown in communication results when how is used in response to an event that the addressee does not view as a quandary: (61) Jason and Sam are classmates. Jason gets an A for his exams, whereas Sam receives a passing grade. Jason: how? Sam: how what? Jason: You didn’t get A. Sam: Er… I’m just happy to pass this exam. The exchange shown in (61) occurs because of the different impressions the speakers have towards the same scenario. Jason’s use of how suggests that not getting an A should seen as a quandary. On the other hand, Sam does not have the same understanding of the situation, since he just wanted to pass. Just passing the exams is therefore a quandary; it is in fact a positive event for him. Because of this, he expresses his puzzlement to Jason about what the quandary was referring to. This is not the same as a misunderstanding – whereas a misunderstanding results from an incorrect interpretation of a previous discourse/utterance, it is clear from the exchange that Sam possesses the knowledge of how and has interpreted the utterance accurately – the difference lies in the fact that he is unable identify any scenario in the immediate context as being a quandary. Hence, to bring our attention back to examples such as (60), the mother uses how with the illocutionary force of a ‘reprimand’, asking her child how he/she would make up for the mistake that he/she had made prior to the point of utterance (in this case, the breaking of the cup). 65 This leads our discussion to the point where the use of independent how and how with an accompanying utterance diverge. It is used in response to an event that has already occurred, although the speaker need not be present at the time of the event happening. The speaker, in using how as a reply to a previous utterance, expresses his/her recognition of the quandary and presents a question to the addressee to elicit details of how he/she would deal with the quandary at hand: (62) Boy is staring in despair at his pile of unfinished homework. Boy: How? (=What am I going to do about this?) (63) Boy fails his exam. He shows his exam script to his mother. Mother : how? Your dad is going to kill you when he sees this. (64) A: I accidentally smashed my mom’s perfume bottle. B: how? (=What are you going to do about this?) In (62), the boy is aware of the quandary – the pile of unfinished homework that he will not be able to complete. He thus uses how as a way of expressing this helplessness/despair. For the purposes of this thesis, the term ‘addressee’ may include the speaker him/herself in the event that the speaker makes a comment only he/she is a recipient of e.g. the speaker is alone or speaking to him/herself. Similarly in (63), both the mother and her son are aware that failing the exams is a quandary – the mother’s reply about the father being extremely angry recognizes that the consequences of what happened is certainly not desirable. Finally, in (64), Speaker B’s response suggests that he recognizes the breaking of the perfume bottle as an adverse event, and asks Speaker A about what he/she was going to do about it. 66 5.5 MITIGATING THE QUANDARY The above discussion leads us to another aspect of how: who is responsible for mitigating the quandary. Looking at the two uses of how, it appears that the role of mitigating the quandary is solely centered on the addressee when how is used independently of an utterance. This sense is captured by the judgments shown in (65): (65) Xiao Ming dropped Jane’s glass plate, shattering it. J: How? (Gloss: what are you going to do about it?) XM: I’ll clean up the mess. XM: Let’s clean up the mess together. (?) XM: You must clean up the mess.* Conversely, in instances where how is accompanied by an utterance, there is a stronger sense that the quandary is mutual, and that the speaker is asking the addressee to furnish details on how they will be able to mitigate the quandary. I would like to suggest that the reason for the intuitions above is due to the nature of the contexts that underlie when independent how and how used with an utterance are used respectively. More often than not, when how is used with an accompanying utterance, the hypothetical scenario is mainly circumstantial. By circumstantial, I mean that how can be used as a response to any scenario, as long as the unexpected scenario maintains relevance with the context. In contrast, how is used independently in response to adverse scenarios that arise due to the action of one of the interlocutors, usually the addressee. To take (65) for example, Xiao Ming caused the breaking of the plate, and the quandary is therefore strongly associated to the action and him as a result. What we may suggest from the discussion so far is that a distinction can be made between both uses of how depending on the speaker’s perception of who 67 is responsible for resolving the quandary. In the case of how being used with an accompanying utterance, the quandary is more ‘inclusive’ such that the speaker invites the addressee to participate in offering a solution to the quandary. While the speaker does not explicitly state that he/she will participate in mitigating the quandary, the option is left open. On the other hand, how used without an accompanying utterance implies that the speaker recognizes that the problem is caused by the addressee, and that only the addressee alone is responsible for finding a solution to the problem. 5.6 QUANDARY AS AN IMPLICATURE The examples so far suggest that the quandary takes the form of a conversational implicature. Indeed, there are no overt indicators within the utterance that expresses the how scenario as a quandary. The listener arrives at this interpretation because of the presence of how, which guides the addressee towards the speaker’s intended meaning: (66a) A: I am going to the market to get some food. B: The butcher not open at this time how? (66b) The time is 9am A: I am going to the market to get some food. B: The butcher open at 10am how? (66c) *The time is 11am A: I am going to the market to get some food. B: The butcher open at 10am how? Assuming that the addressee recognizes the implicature in (66a), the scenario of the butcher being closed makes no indication that it should be treated as a quandary based on pure propositional meaning. In fact, since A did not indicate specifically that he is heading to the butcher in the previous utterance, it is unclear whether or not the butcher being open presents a problem to A. 68 On the other hand, even if it were true that A intended to visit the butcher, the utterance merely indicates the possibility that the butcher’s will not be in business for A to purchase his/her meat, but there is no emotive element of a quandary within the utterance. The scenarios in (66b) and (66c) further attest to this claim by demonstrating a mismatch between what how is used to implicate and the active speech context. Using how gives rise to a contextual implicature. In line with conversational theory, for the addressee to maintain the assumption that the speaker aims at optimal relevance, the addressee must supply the contextual premise: (67) It is a quandary that the butcher opens at 10am. This is admittedly not very clear in the case of (66a) since the context of speech is not clear, but in the case of (66b) and (66c) where the context has been restricted, (66b) is accepted because the implicature matches the context. Conversely, (66c) is unacceptable because the implicature that arises from how conflicts with the context; the scenario of the butcher opening at 10am is not only expected, it should not be seen as quandary to the interlocutors. Since the utterance takes the form of an implicature, the addressee may negate it. This may be done using two main ‘strategies’: suggesting at the unlikelihood of the scenario happening, or to express his/her disagreement towards considering the hypothetical scenario as a quandary: (68a) A: My dad will come home on his own today. B: He (speaker’s dad) get lost how? A: Nah it won’t happen. He knows his way around. (68b) Two students are talking before class commences A: Hey I’m going to rest for a bit. I’m not feeling well. B: The teacher come in how? 69 A: I already told her that I am sick. (I will not get into trouble because I have already informed the teacher that I am not feeling well) In (68a), Speaker A expresses that the hypothetical scenario of his father losing his way would not happen at all. Since the probability of hypothetical scenario itself is rejected, there is no quandary in the eyes of A. In (68b) on the other hand, Speaker A does not reject the possibility of the teacher coming into the class. In fact, given the context of the utterance, the teacher will most definitely enter the class soon. What speaker A rejects is B’s view that the teacher coming into class is a quandary, since he will not be reprimanded for resting having earlier informed the teacher about being ill. It is clear from the discussion then, that the onus of the utterance interpretation lies heavily on how- how guides the addressee towards the intended interpretation of the utterance. In using how, the speaker identifies a possible scenario arising from the context as particularly problematic, and establishes it as common knowledge between the interlocutors. What this also suggests is that none of the utterances are inherently marked for adversity. In a sense, the illocutionary force of the utterance is centered on how such that the scenario is framed as an adverse event, and leads the addressee towards the speaker’s intended interpretation. This is consistent with my previous observation in Section 3.4, where the post-sekali utterance, originally unmarked for adversity, has a sense of being interpreted as adverse with the addition of the how construction to form an interrogative. Secondly, the quandary should be understood in terms of the speaker’s point of view. That is, it does not matter if the proposition is socially accepted as 70 something positive/beneficial to the recipient(s) of the action, as long as it is detrimental to the speaker’s desires or expectations. To illustrate, consider (69) – (70): (69a) *Jane is desperate to get married Jane: I think Tom is not going to marry me. Jack: He propose to you tomorrow how? (69b) (Jane does not want to get married) I think Tom is not going to marry me. He propose to you tomorrow how? (70a) We hate John I think John is destined to be poor all his life. He strike lottery how? ?(70b) We like John I think John is destined to be poor all his life. He strike lottery how? Being proposed to is generally viewed as a positive event, but how in (69) can only be used in the context where Jane does not want to get married and the speaker is also aware of this. In this case, the scenario of Tom proposing is therefore treated as a quandary not only to the speaker, but to Jane as well. Similarly, receiving an unexpected windfall from a lottery win is generally perceived as a positive event, yet it cannot be used in (70b) with how to show that the speakers are happy that John’s situation has made a turn for the better; it can only be used in the scenario both interlocutors dislike John and do not desire him to receive that unexpected windfall. It should probably be mentioned that an acceptable interpretation may certainly be ‘forced’ from (70b) if one considers that the speaker is afraid that after becoming rich, John may change into an unlikable person. Therefore, under this context, the windfall from the lottery is not perceived as something that is desirable for the 71 speaker and the interpretation of the implicature relies on both how and the context of utterance. 5.7 HOW AND DISCOURSE CONNECTORS A broader understanding of how can be made by considering its interaction with various other constructions. The how frequently occurs with a variety of discourse connectors (I exclude sekali at this point and discuss it in the next section): (71) I accidentally smashed my mom’s perfume bottle Then how? (=what did you do about it?) (72) The teacher called me into her office So how? (=so what are you going to do?) Then how? (73) My dog ran out of the house this morning and it’s not back yet Sekali someone take it home how? After someone take it home how? As discussed in Chapter 2, relevance theorists like Blakemore (1987, 2002) have suggested that discourse connectives are understood to have inferential functions, the nature of the connection to be determined by the hearer. While the default understanding of any utterance is that it advances the immediately preceding speech event (Sacks, 1987, 1995), the use of connectives such as so has been shown to perform some form of interactional agenda such as the prefacing of new topics (Bolden, 2008). It appears that the discourse connectives that how frequently occur with have the function of facilitating the discussion about what the speaker is planning now that the quandary has been identified. At the same time, the inferential processes that the connectives are used to indicate still remain. That is, connectives like then, so, after and even sekali acknowledge the preceding utterance and indicate the speaker’s interest 72 in moving the conversational topic to the next step - by asking about the addressee’s proposed solution to the quandary. In contrast, discourse connectives that do not imply this kind of sequential connection in the conversation cannot be used with how: (74) A: I accidentally smashed my mom’s perfume bottle B: *But how? (What did you do about it) But is typically used in the discourse initial position to indicate the speaker’s disagreement with the previous utterance and possibly inviting the addressee to debate on a previously mentioned point. Due to this, there is a conflict of objectives between the connector and what is intended with how, since how used independently assumes that the quandary is not debatable and it is mainly interested in the addressee’s solution for the quandary. A final note needs to be made about so how. Depending on the scenario framing the preceding utterance, so how may be interpreted as a variant of the Standard English interrogative so how did it go? (75a) A: The teacher called me to her office (I have not gone in yet). B: So how? (so what are you going to do) A: I think I’d better bring some work to show her. A’: *She scolded me. (75b) A: The teacher called me to her office (I have already gone in) B: So how? (so what happened next) A: *I think I’d better bring some work to show her. A’: She scolded me. Although the initial utterance in (75a) and (75b) are in the past tense, two interpretations are possible: one where speaker A has not yet gone into the office (75a), and the other where speaker A has already entered the office and returned (75b). 73 The difference between the two interpretations lies in the fact that if the scenario of being called into the office is viewed as a quandary, there is still a possibility of avoiding the quandary in (75a). For (75b) on the other hand, it is obvious that the quandary cannot/ can no longer have a solution (since it has already happened), hence blocking the use of so how from asking the addressee what he/she did about the quandary, and only allowing the interpretation of so how did it go. Due to the varying interpretation of the initial utterances, the unacceptable replies are the result of a conflict between the implicature as a result of the tense and the semantics of the howutterances4. 5.8 THE SEKALI-HOW CONNECTION Now that the how construction has been discussed in detail, I return to the sekali-how construction and attempt to explain the reason behind the high frequency of usage between the two constructions. I argue that this is mainly possible due to the fact that sekali and how do not conflict with one another in terms of semantic and distributional properties, and that how’s function of expressing an unexpected adverse event is useful as a disambiguator for CSE speakers. That being said, it remains to be seen whether the examples presented so far justifies my initial claim of sekali-how being a separate construction. I will discuss each point in turn. 4 For the purposes of this thesis, I exclude examples such as (65b) as it does not demonstrate the kind of acceptability that CSE how is observed to possess. In addition, the kind of interpretation brought about by (65b) suggests that this use of so how is more closely related to Standard English how. 74 5.8.1 SEMANTIC/DISTRIBUTIONAL COMPATIBILITY Looking at the semantic and distributional properties of both constructions, one can see that both sekali and how share several similarities in the way that meaning is expressed. The discussion in Chapter 3 (on sekali) and the present chapter has shown that both constructions are employed to express some form of unexpectedness. While sekali functions as a discourse connector and how as a question marker, both rely on suggesting a hypothetical scenario as a way of expressing this unexpectedness. Because of this, it is reasonable to expect that a legitimate utterance that can occur with sekali can also occur with how, as demonstrated in (76)-(77): (76) A: John didn’t study for the exams B: Sekali he get full marks B’: He get full marks how? B’’: Sekali he get full marks how? (77) Two guys watch a soccer match. The score is 0-0 nearing fulltime. B: Sekali they let in one goal B’: They let in one goal how? B’’: Sekali they let in one goal how? The examples above show sekali and how used in response to an overt utterance and a non-overt linguistic context in (76) and (77) respectively. As we can see, the kind of utterances and scenarios that both constructions are able to occur with are similar. It is assumed that for the B’ and B’’ examples to be acceptable, the scenarios must have been perceived as a quandary to the speaker. Since both constructions perform different grammatical functions and occur at different positions of the utterance, there is no reason why the two cannot occur together. Sekali occurs utterance initially to indicate a relationship with 75 the previous discourse, while how is used at the utterance-final position, turning the sekali-utterance into a direct interrogative. Since both the semantic and distributional requirements of sekali and how appear to be compatible, it follows that the B’’ replies demonstrated in both examples above should be allowed. 5.8.2 HOW AND ADVERSITY The issue that arises out of this is essentially with regard to the redundancy of constructions: Why there is a need for two separate constructions- how and sekali to express unexpectedness, and more importantly – why are the two constructions used so frequently together? Recall in Chapter 3, I suggested that a sekali-how utterance gives a sense that the unexpected event is undesirable to the speaker. It is clear now that the reason for this sense is mainly due to the properties of how. Since how expresses adversity in the form of a quandary, it follows that any scenario that how expresses is marked for adversity. By using how with the sekali construction, the post-sekali utterance which is originally unspecified for adversity, gains a strong sense of adversity. However, the fact remains that sekali is still able to express unexpected events that are adverse in nature. If this were true, then it would appear that the role of how in expressing adverse unexpected events in CSE is somewhat redundant. I would like to suggest that a possible answer for this might lie in understanding the nature of verbal communication and how utterance interpretation is managed during the course of conversation. While sekali may be used to describe scenarios that may be either negative or positive to the 76 speaker, the semantics of how is strictly such that the reader is lead towards the interpretation that the event is adverse. If one assumes that the speaker aims to be maximally relevant during conversation (Blakemore, 1987, 2002), it would follow that if a speaker intends to convey an adverse unexpected event, using how would aid greatly with the addressee’s processing of his/her utterance. Using sekali on the other hand, will require the addressee to search within the context of the utterance to determine whether the speaker is treating the hypothetical scenario as a quandary or not. In other words, how may be used as some form of ‘pragmatic disambiguator’ to allow the addressee to arrive at the correct interpretation as easily as possible. Also, since the postsekali utterance takes the form of a declarative, the sekali-utterance may appear somewhat rhetorical such that no reply is expected. The reason that how is used with sekali frequently may therefore be part of a conversational strategy by the speaker to maintain the existing conversation since framing the utterance as a question would elicit a reply from the addressee. Our discussion on the two constructions has led us towards the issue of expressing adversity: while sekali can be used to express negative or positive unexpectedness, how specifically marks any utterance that it is used with for adversity. This leads to the question of whether there are other constructions in CSE like sekali and how, which could be treated as a subcategory of constructions aimed at expressing unexpected events, where the differences in their use are based on the degree of adversity expressed, ranging from negatively specified to specified. Since sekali and how take up the ‘unspecified’ and ‘specified’ positions on the spectrum, we are left with a slot for a construction that similarly expresses unexpectedness but is ‘negatively 77 specified’ for adversity. In the next chapter, I demonstrate that the lucky construction is an excellent candidate for this position along the adversity spectrum. 5.8.3 SEKALI-HOW AS A CONSTRUCTION As a final note, should we consider sekali-how as a construction? Given the presence of how, sekali and sekali-how in the CSE repertoire, the question remains to whether the sekali-how construction exhibits any properties that are not strictly predictable from our knowledge of the sekali and how constructions respectively. Unfortunately, at this point of time, it appears that the answer is negative. The judgments demonstrate that a sekali-how utterance maintains the same sense as a regular how utterance, with no observable difference in the interpretation of the two kinds of utterances. Despite this, several reasons remain in support of considering sekali-how as a separate construction in the CSE speech repertoire. Firstly, from the point of view of the usage-based model of grammar, there is no reason why it should not, since redundancy in constructions is relatively accepted. This is especially so when the presence of a ‘redundant’ construction is coupled with a functional purpose in the language. As discussed in the previous section, sekali and how may be used together to specifically express a negative unexpected event and allow the addressee to arrive at the interpretation of the adversity with minimal processing cost as compared to using sekali or how independently of one another. Secondly, from the point of view of GT, recall that in Chapter 4 I suggested that sekali-how bears great functional similarity to the ruguo-zhe me ban hypothetical construction in Mandarin. This hints at 78 an alternate possibility that sekali-how may in fact be a complete construction borrowed from Mandarin and may therefore have developed along a different path of language change as initially expected. Due to time and scope constraints, I am forced to leave the exploration of this issue to further studies. 5.9 SUMMARY In this chapter, I discussed the how construction. I showed that how functions as a question marker in CSE, and like the sekali construction, expresses some form of unexpectedness. However, it serves a relatively more specialized function of framing the unexpected scenario as a quandary, thus marking it for adversity. Despite similarities with the sekali construction, I argued that how is frequently used alongside sekali because it helps disambiguate adverse scenarios, thereby reducing the interpretation processing load on the side of the addressee. Additionally, its role as question marker may be used with a sekali utterance, inviting the addressee to participate in the conversation. Finally, I posit that constructions may be classified along a spectrum of adversity, where sekali and how are situated on the unspecified and negatively specified categories respectively. In the next chapter, I introduce the lucky construction. 79 CHAPTER 6 THE LUCKY CONSTRUCTION 6.1 INTRODUCTION In Chapters 3 and 5, I discussed the sekali and how constructions in detail. I suggested that sekali may be considered unspecified for adversity, while how may be used to express adversity. This chapter highlights the final construction in this thesis: the lucky construction. While sekali, how and lucky have their independent semantics and conditions of usage, I show that they are related in terms of how they express unexpectedness, where lucky is negatively specified for adversity. In doing so, I argue that it is reasonable to consider expressing unexpectedness in CSE along a spectrum of adversity, of which the choice of which construction to use depends on the perception of adversity by the speaker. In this sense, like the sekali and how constructions, lucky too expresses some form of unexpectedness. In section 6.2, I discuss the semantics of unexpectedness that lucky is used to convey. The function of lucky as a discourse connector and its alternative usage as an exclamation is explored in Sections 6.3 and 6.4 respectively. Finally in 6.5, I discuss how lucky can be viewed in terms of expressing events that are negatively marked for adversity. 6.2 UNEXPECTEDNESS Like sekali and how, the lucky construction is used to express some form of unexpectedness. Examples of the typical use of lucky in CSE is shown in (78)–(80): 80 (78) I was going to be late for school. Lucky James gave me a lift (79) A: The teacher was going to scold me. B: Lucky I came in time! (80) A: John was almost hit by a car. B: Lucky someone pushed him off the road in time. The lucky construction typically consists of two parts; the pre-lucky statement generally describes a situation or state of affairs prior to the point of utterance. The second part occurs in the post-lucky position and expresses unexpectedness through another event that prevents the expected consequence of the pre-lucky statement from being fulfilled. To elaborate, the unexpectedness in (78) involves the speaker getting a lift, thus preventing him/her from arriving late. Similarly in (79), the unexpectedness is conveyed in terms of the addressee avoiding the teacher’s scolding. It must be emphasized that what the post-lucky event mediates is the consequence of the preceding utterance, and not the completion of the event itself. Both concepts may often overlap, as seen in (79) and (80), but a distinction between the completion of the event and the consequence needs to be made in some instances: (81) It rained heavily just now. Lucky someone lent me an umbrella. (82) I was jobless for a long time already. Lucky my friend gave me a job. The fact that it rained and that the speaker was jobless in (81) and (82) respectively may be considered as ‘completed’ events. In this sense, it would not be accurate to say that lucky mediates the completion of the event since a completed event can no longer be interrupted. The fact that lucky is still able 81 to express unexpectedness despite this suggests that what the post-lucky event mediates is not the completion of the event. Lending someone an umbrella prevents the receiver from being drenched in the rain. Also, giving one a job not only solves the problem of joblessness, it provides the individual with an income. Both events are contrary to the speakers’ expectations of what should result if the events expressed in the respective pre-lucky statements continued uninterrupted. By this reasoning, lucky should be understood as expressing an event that mediates the expected consequence of the events in the preceding statement. What also follows from the above reasoning is that lucky cannot be used for events where the consequences have already occurred and can no longer be prevented. Such instances occur where the consequences of the event follow closely from the completion of the event itself: (83) *A: The teacher scolded me. B: Lucky I came in time to help you. In the case of (83), the consequence of the event can probably be the negative feelings that A experiences as a result of a scolding. However, since the scolding has already taken place, this consequence has already been experienced and cannot be prevented, unlike example (84) below where B’s utterance is referring to mediating the expected consequence of A having to do the work all by himself: (84) A: The teacher scolded me and made me sweep the floor alone. B: Lucky I came in time to help you. 82 Unlike the sekali and how constructions that rely on a hypothetical to express the speaker’s unexpectedness, the post lucky utterance can only refer to an event that occurs in past time, whether it is explicitly reflected in terms of the tense or not. 6.3 A DISCOURSE CONNECTOR The distributional properties of lucky as seen in the previous section are suggestive of the construction being a discourse connector. Firstly, it connects two units of utterances together in terms of a coherence relationship. As shown in Section 6.2, lucky is used to indicate the speaker’s unexpectedness about the mediation of a consequence found in the previous utterance. To elaborate, the pre-lucky utterance is implied to be adverse to the speaker. On the other hand, since the post-lucky utterance prevents the adverse consequence from running its full course, the implication would be that the event is viewed as beneficial, at least from the speaker’s point of view. The role of lucky as a discourse connector therefore is to guide the addressee towards the interpretation that the post-lucky statement is an unexpected but beneficial event preventing the consequences of the first event from running its full course. Additionally, lucky also occurs at a discourse initial position and may refer to a non-spoken context: (85) A man crosses the road recklessly A: Lucky he didn’t get hit by a car. The observation that lucky occurs discourse initially extends to situations where the speaker uses lucky in response to his/her own preceding utterance. In these cases, the new utterance is signaled by a prosodic pause or some other 83 speech device (for example, laughter) that is used to indicate the separation between the pre-lucky and post-lucky utterance. (86a) A: I realized I didn’t bring my wallet today. Lucky I found some money in my bag. *(86b) A: I realized I didn’t bring my wallet today lucky I found some money in my bag. 6.4 LUCKY AS AN EXCLAMATION Lucky can also be used without any accompanying utterances in CSE. In this case, it is used as an exclamation marker. As an exclamation, lucky may be used this way under two main circumstances: the first is in response to an utterance containing both the initial event and the mediating event and secondly, in instances where the unexpected event is a non-verbal scenario that the speaker experiences. Consistent with what we have discussed, lucky expresses some form of unexpectedness in both circumstances: (87) A: My mom slipped while walking down the stairs but I caught her just in time. B: lucky! (88a) A dashes across the road, narrowly avoiding the path of an incoming car A: lucky! (88b) A sees a boy dash across the road, narrowly avoiding the path of an oncoming car. A: lucky! Looking at (87), one can see that the initial utterance contains both the scenario and the event mediating the expected consequence of the speaker’s mother slipping down the stairs. Similarly in the examples (88a) and (88b), the expected consequence is avoided by the action taken by the subject of the sentence. While (88) does not follow the regular ‘adverse event-mediating 84 event’ pattern that characterizes the use of lucky so far, one can consider that the two required events are found within the non-spoken scenario that Speaker A observes i.e. the adverse event is the car speeding towards the boy and the mediating event is the boy avoiding the car, therefore avoiding certain death. This appears somewhat tenuous, but one can show that the analysis holds with the example shown in (89), where it is clear that mediating event must be a positive one before lucky may be used as a legitimate exclamation: *(89) The road was empty, and a boy dashed across it. A: Lucky! As the act of the boy dashing across the empty road does not present a scenario that is particularly adverse to the boy or the speaker, lucky cannot be used to indicate that the act of dashing across the road is somehow positive for the speaker, reaffirming our expectation that lucky remains consistent even in response to non-spoken contexts. 6.5 LUCKY AND ADVERSITY As I suggested in Section 6.3, the adversity is speaker centered. That is, the use of the lucky construction is reflective of the speaker’s current perception with regard to the scenarios preceding and following the construction. To the speaker, the pre-lucky event is considered as adverse. (90a) It was raining heavily. Lucky someone gave me an umbrella. (90b) *It was raining heavily. Lucky no one gave me an umbrella. While it is generally undisputed in some cases that the pre-lucky event is negative, the adversity in the pre-lucky utterance can often take a more indirect form i.e. a conversational implicature. That is, the adversity is (typically) not 85 explicitly stated, but the addressee is able to arrive at this interpretation through the presence of lucky. To take (90) for instance, the event whereby the speaker experiences heavy rain is arguably neutral in terms of adversity. However, it is the implicature that he/she would be drenched as a consequence (due to the lack of available shelter/umbrellas) arising from the presence of lucky that leads the addressee towards the adverse reading of the utterance. Implicit with this idea is the sense that there can possibly be nothing to prevent/stop the event from happening at the point of the event and that the recipient would suffer all the adverse consequences that the event entails. Secondly, the post-lucky utterance must describe an event that resolves or prevents the adverse event from running its full course. This event is therefore contrary to the recipient’s prior expectations. The unexpectedness that lucky conveys is more specific in nature, in the sense that it only permits the expression of an unexpected event that is negatively specified for adversity i.e. positive. Like the pre-lucky event, the positive event is a conversational implicature, where the addressee’s interpretation is guided by the presence of lucky. As long as the speaker views the event as positive, lucky may be used to express this. The reverse is also true: if the event is not positive to the speaker, lucky cannot be used to express this unexpectedness: (91a) *Speaker dislikes John John was going to be late for work. Lucky someone offered him a lift. (91b) Speaker likes John John was going to be late for work. Lucky someone offered him a lift. 86 Both (91a) and (91b) shows the same utterances, but under different contexts. The contexts alone are able to determine whether lucky can be used, because adversity is speaker centered. If the event described does not correspond to the speaker’s impression of it as a positive event, the use of lucky will not be accurate in expressing his/her feeling of unexpectedness, and will thus be unacceptable. 6.6 SUMMARY In this chapter, I studied lucky as a means of shedding some light on the sekali and how constructions, in particular my claim that various constructions which express unexpectedness may be viewed along a spectrum of adversity. Being a discourse connector like sekali, lucky exhibits several semantic and distributional properties that are similar to sekali, including the fact that it occurs utterance initial and can refer to a pragmatic non-spoken context. However, this is where the similarities stop and the differences begin. In line with my argument in the previous chapter, I showed that lucky can only be used to describe an unexpected event that is positive in nature. Similar to the other constructions, this expression of adversity is also speaker centered. In the next chapter, I will consolidate my discussion by drawing comparisons between the three constructions discussed in this thesis in terms of how unexpectedness is expressed, and relate these findings to the larger field of study. 87 CHAPTER 7 BRINGING IT TOGETHER- LUCKY, HOW AND SEKALI 7.1 INTRODUCTION In the previous chapter, I discussed the lucky construction – the last of the three constructions analyzed in this thesis. I showed that like sekali and how, lucky can also be understood in terms of expressing unexpectedness, where it is used in response to situations that are treated as positive to the speaker. In this chapter, I situate the concept of expressing ‘unexpectedness’ to the wider field of study, and argue that unexpectedness can similarly be used to understand constructions in other languages, in turn suggesting that perhaps ‘unexpectedness’ can be considered as a subsystem. In Section 7.2, I consolidate the discussion of unexpectedness in CSE as laid out in this thesis. In 7.3, I present evidence of constructions that express unexpectedness in other languages, and locate our study within the field of study, demonstrating that unexpectedness may be considered as part of a much larger phenomenon found in language studies. 7.2 UNEXPECTEDNESS IN CSE As my discussion of the sekali, how and lucky constructions has attempted to show, the three constructions may be viewed as part of a subset of constructions that are commonly used by speakers of CSE to express unexpectedness. The unexpectedness is dependent on the viewpoint of the speaker and is typically expressed in the form of an implicature. That is, the speaker views a particular scenario as unexpected, and attempts to express this evaluation to the addressee. The exception to this property is independent how, 88 where the speaker may expect the addressee to be able to recognize the unexpected scenario, primarily because both the speaker and the addressee are present at the point of utterance and are in direct contact with the scenario which acts as an unspoken context. As I demonstrated in Chapter 6, lucky is specifically used to express positive unexpected events. If the scenario is neither positive and/or unexpected, lucky cannot be used. A comparison of this with the findings of sekali and how in Chapters 3 and 5 respectively, more specifically on their treatment of adversity suggests that varying degrees of unexpectedness ranging from negative to positive can be expressed by the three constructions. With this, the claim that constructions can be viewed along a spectrum of adversity is a reasonable one, since our findings have shown three constructions that nicely correspond to the range of adversity. Given that language is symbolic in nature, it is not surprising to expect that speakers of a language will have constructions to express their attitudes and evaluation of experiences across a range of situational contexts. Under this interpretation, the spectrum of adversity is best understood as a way which speakers employ different constructions as a means to disambiguate the meanings that they attempt to express (in this particular case, unexpectedness), such that the processing load on the part of the addressee is reduced. If this is true, studying other constructions in CSE in the general direction laid out by this thesis may yield similar findings to further lend strength to the claim of a category of constructions dealing with ‘expressing unexpectedness’, as well as shed more interesting insights on the topic. 89 7.3 ‘UNEXPECTEDNESS’ IN A CROSS–LINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVE While there is admittedly a current lack of studies on other constructions in CSE that express unexpectedness, the strength of the claim can perhaps be found by looking at evidence in other languages. One question that follows from the preceding discussion is whether unexpectedness as a category of constructions is only localized within CSE, or can be recognized as more of a general phenomenon. To address this question, I would like to bring the reader’s attention to evidence of constructions dealing with the expression of unexpectedness in other languages. Several studies involving constructions in other languages show evidence of linguistic marking of utterances that indicate some kind of information that is unexpected (or new) to the speaker. This is demonstrated in the case of the lõ construction in Hare, an Athapaskan language, which expresses the (direct) perception of the speaker towards the presence of an unexpected fact (DeLancey, 2001): (92) [From DeLancey, (2001: 376), originally appearing as (12). Emphasis mine.] Mary ewé’ ghálayeda lõ work/3s subj/IMPF ‘Mary is working on hides.’ As DeLancey suggests, the utterance can only be used in the context where the speaker has no previous knowledge of the situation, and has just met Mary (possibly at her house) and found her working on a hide. The knowledge is therefore new and unexpected to the speaker. A similar observation is demonstrated in Sohn’s (1999) discussion of the –kwun and –ney markers in 90 Korean which are used to express surprise and unexpectedness at the moment of speech: (93) [From Sohn (1999: 272), originally appearing as 9a and b. Emphases mine.] a. pi ka o-nun-kwun! Rain NM come-IN-APP ‘Oh, it’s raining!’ (discovery and confirmation) b. pi ka o-ney! Rain NM come-APP ‘Oh, it’s raining!’ (counterexpectation) Examples of the type shown above are commonly treated as belonging to the category of ‘miratives’ in the literature (Slater, 1996; Watters, 1998a, b; DeLancey, 2001; Strauss; 2005). DeLancey (1997: 35) provides the following as an operational definition of mirativity: ‘‘..[I]t marks both statements based on inference and statements based on direct experience for which the speaker had no psychological preparation.’’ This being said, it should be mentioned that studies on mirativity are often done in relation to epistemic modality and more specifically, evidentiality linguistic systems through which speakers express their awareness of a particular truth on the basis of knowledge or information source—primarily based on whether the speaker has actually directly perceived something (e.g. witnessed, heard, tasted, felt) as opposed to indirect sources as inference, hearsay (Bybee, 1985; Aksu-Koc. and Slobin, 1986; DeLancey, 1999, 2001; Friedman, 1986, 2003) and even dreams (Friedman, 2003). This is hardly surprising, since the phenomena of modality, evidentiality and mirativity can be both semantically and paradigmatically inter-related, often deriving from common sources in many languages. As such, the boundaries between them may be less than clear. Nevertheless, DeLancey’s study on Hare has shown 91 that a ‘pure’ mirative can exist independently of an evidential paradigm. In fact, a pure mirative can also be expressed in English, although it is typically covert and is realized through intonation or stress: (94) Wow, Jane can really cook! The example of (94) clearly demonstrates through the stress on really that the knowledge that the speaker expresses was uninternalized up to the point of utterance. This is supported by the use of wow as an indicator of surprise at the sudden acquisition of this new information. In addition, the use of the mirative also indicates that the new/unexpected knowledge is a counterexpectation. That is, the utterance suggests that the speaker has an expectation prior to experiencing the knowledge - namely that Jane cannot cook well. The utterance therefore is an expression that the truth was opposite of that which was initially expected. Returning our discussion to unexpectedness in CSE, it is clear that this phenomena of constructions that function to express unexpectedness is not localized to CSE but is relatively widespread in other languages as well. However, it is also clear from the preceding examples that sekali, how and lucky should not be considered as belonging to the mirative category. For one, mirativity is a category where there is direct perception of the event and the acquisition of new knowledge that follow. The speaker is therefore expressing this change in consciousness and his/her state of knowledge at the point where new information is gained. The CSE constructions however, do not reflect this change in mental state of the speaker. In fact, there is no direct (or indirect) perception of any new information in sekali and how since they primarily 92 make use of hypotheticals to express unexpectedness and they only make reference to a past event. While lucky does not make use of a hypothetical, there is often no direct perception on the part of the speaker since lucky can be used in response to a preceding utterance which was not made by the speaker and is therefore an expression of an evaluation rather than first hand knowledge. It should be mentioned however, that how used independently shows some sense of a point-like recognition in the speaker of a quandary either through direct experience of an event or through a recount that brings him/her to the (sudden) realization that the information he/she had just received is adverse and unexpected. The above being said, the constructions shown in Hare, Korean and CSE can be thought of as conceptually related. Each represents the different ways to which unexpectedness can be expressed as well as the state of mind of the speaker towards the unexpected information at the point of utterance. The CSE constructions are primarily evaluative in nature and express the speaker’s evaluation of a scenario based on his/her impression of its level of adversity. The mirative constructions, on the other hand, shows that the information represents knowledge that is new to the speaker. In light of this, I would like to suggest that these constructions should be considered as a special category of constructions that deal with expressing unexpectedness. To clarify, this is not to say that the category of mirativity is irrelevant. In fact, the opposite is true: the studies regarding mirativity are robust and there are extremely useful insights that have arisen from the discussions on mirativity and evidentiality, justifying the creation of such a category to differentiate these two groups of constructions. On a similar vein, that the category remains is also useful to us 93 in differentiating between constructions of this kind from others such as sekali, how and lucky in CSE. Since mirativity can exist independently of the evidential system (c.f. DeLancey, 2001; Strauss, 2005), there is no reason why the category of miratives should not be considered as a subset of the group of constructions that express unexpectedness. 7.4 SUMMARY In this chapter, I argued for the possibility of a category of constructions within CSE that deal with expressing unexpectedness. Through evidence provided by sekali, how and lucky, I posited that speakers, in their desire for expressiveness, use these constructions in a variety of speech situations so as to convey the most efficient and accurate meaning to the addressee. In addition, by examining constructions in several languages such has Hare, Korean and even English, I showed that unexpectedness is perhaps not just a local, but a much larger phenomenon that warrants our attention. The findings of this thesis are summarized in the next chapter. 94 CHAPTER 8 CONCLUSION Various academics have attempted to study the different constructions available in CSE. However, to my knowledge, there has been a noticeable lack of studies concerned with relating these constructions to one another in terms of the kinds of properties that they share. In this thesis, I examined a grammatical construction, sekali. During the process of gaining a deeper understanding of the semantic and distributional properties of the construction, I was led to two other related constructions, how and lucky. I found that the three constructions share a similar property in that they are used to express some form of ‘unexpectedness’. In addition, I argued that the three constructions may be considered along a cline of adversity, with sekali being unspecified while how and lucky takes up the specified and negatively specified positions on the spectrum respectively. Chapter 1 briefly introduced the reader to the sekali construction and laid out the aims of this thesis. I suggested that while unexpectedness is central to understanding sekali, evidence from other constructions such as lucky suggest at the possibility of expressing unexpectedness as being an important feature in our understanding of other constructions in CSE. I also outlined by methodology and the precautions that I took in order to ensure that a fair and unbiased sample of judgments was collected from the respondents. In Chapter 2, I provided the reader with an overview of the CG framework that informed by study on sekali, how and lucky, first by introducing the reader to the concept of the ‘construction’ as used by the framework and 95 subsequently in this thesis. I also discussed some of the assumptions underlying CG. While the study of constructions has given rise to two major approaches to the understanding of what constitutes a ‘construction’ – the usage based and competence based approaches, I inclined my study towards the usage based approach as it allows for the redundancy of constructions and reflects the situation of language in use more accurately. This is significant, as this approach allowed me to justify the presence of a sekali-how construction in the later part of the thesis. In Chapter 3, I discussed the sekali construction. Here, I showed that the semantics of sekali is fairly broad that it can be used to express any form of unexpectedness as long as the unexpected event is plausible given the speech context. Also, I showed that sekali functions as a discourse connective and hypothetical marker in CSE, with the main role of guiding the addressee towards the speaker’s intended interpretation of the post-sekali utterance as an unexpected hypothetical scenario. Next, I bought the reader’s attention to another sense of sekali that I discovered- one that was possessed exclusively by an older generation of speakers (sekali2). While sekali2 similarly expresses unexpectedness, it does not make use of a hypothetical in the post-sekali position. This finding was presented as possible evidence of grammaticalization having taken place, such that what we have is a situation of polysemy resulting from a newer version of sekali replacing the previous sense of sekali2. Finally, I noted the high frequency of pairing between the how construction and sekali, and argued that repeated usage may lead to the fossilization of the construction, hence resulting in a separate sekali-how construction. 96 Chapter 4 continued the discussion started in Chapter 3 by briefly discussing sekali from the point of view of the grammaticalization framework. I began the chapter by first briefly introducing GT. I presented the assumptions underlying the framework and briefly discussed the compatibility between CG and GT. Next, I demonstrated that sekali shows signs of grammaticalization, firstly because it has changed from a more lexical meaning of ‘one time’ in Malay to a more grammatical category of a discourse connector. This claim is further backed up by evidence of semantic bleaching, phonetic reduction, divergence and persistence. In addition, I compared sekali to the Mandarin hypothetical marker ru guo, and suggested that the striking resemblance of sekali-how in CSE and ru guo – zhe me ban in Mandarin are highly suggestive of the influence of substrate Mandarin syntax on the sekali construction. In Chapter 5, I studied the how construction. Like sekali, how expresses unexpectedness through the use of a hypothetical. However, the main difference lies in the fact that how expresses the unexpected event as a quandary, hence marking the event for adversity. I identified two uses of how and suggested that how is used independent of an accompanying utterance when the speaker expects the addressee to be aware of the quandary, and conversely with an utterance when the adversity is speaker centered. Because of the different expectations, who is expected to mitigate the quandary is also affected. I then returned to the issue of the sekali-how construction, and suggested that although the sekali-how construction does not present us with any evidence of additional meaning that is more than the sum of the constituent parts, it may have a specific place in CSE conversational theory speakers may employ how with a legitimate sekali utterance to disambiguate 97 the expressing of an adverse unexpected event and reduce processing costs. In Chapter 6, the lucky construction was briefly discussed as a means of rounding up my discussion on the different kinds of unexpectedness expressed within CSE. The chapter briefly discussed the semantic and distributional properties of lucky, and presented an argument to relate the sekali, how and lucky constructions along a cline of adversity – lucky being negatively specified, sekali being unspecified, and how taking the specified end of the spectrum. Finally, in Chapter 7, I rounded up the discussion of the three CSE constructions sekali, how and lucky. I also presented constructions that are more traditionally known in the literature as miratives, and showed that while different from the CSE constructions studied in this thesis in that they express the sudden recognition of new information gained from direct perception, as compared to the CSE constructions that express an evaluation of a state of affairs or a scenario which may or may not be directly perceived, they are similar in that they express unexpectedness. The concept of expressing unexpectedness can therefore be treated as a larger phenomenon involving a considerable number of constructions across languages, constituted by subsets of constructions such as miratives as well as those in CSE that deal with expressing an evaluation of an unexpected event along a cline of adversity. To conclude, I set out to address a puzzle involving the contrast of the sekali construction with the English conjunction so, and discovered that an important aspect of the semantics of sekali involved the concept of ‘unexpectedness’. As I have shown, the concept of unexpectedness is not exclusive to sekali but 98 can be used to understand several other constructions within CSE. This led me to the study of two other related constructions: how and lucky, showing that the concept of unexpectedness is central to the understanding and use of these constructions. In the process of doing so, I discovered that the difference between these constructions is in the kinds of unexpectedness that is expressed. The analysis of sekali, how and lucky as constructions that express different degrees of unexpectedness raises some questions which researchers may find interesting. While I have so far explored the phenomena of expressing unexpectedness within CSE itself and found evidence for the same kind of phenomena in other languages such as Hare and Korean, it would be interesting to learn whether a similar classification system can be used crosslinguistically to understand other constructions, more specifically in the substrate languages of Mandarin and Malay. This would not only make the claims of this thesis more robust, but may provide important insights that I may not have been aware of during the course of my study. As a final note, I have left open the question of whether the sekali-how construction is indeed derived from substrate Mandarin. One possible way of investigating this would be to check if Malay speakers of CSE are able to form grammatical judgments of the how and sekali-how utterances. If the hypothesis is correct, Malay speakers of CSE may find it difficult to have a consistent judgment of the two respective constructions. 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Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. 104 [...]... entire continuum of linguistic expressions, ranging from those that are highly irregular to those that are more common by providing the machinery to study how constructions are related to each other, and how they combine to form newer ones Also, in line with the claims of the constructional approach, no construction is more central in terms of its role in creating and expressing meaning While the intuitions... shift in meaning and use of the construction over time This is discussed in further detail in Section 4.4, where we see that sekali, originally having the literal meaning of one time in Malay, loses this meaning after being borrowed into CSE 2.3.3 LEVELS OF SPECIFICITY Finally, constructions vary in degrees of specificity, with some lexically specified and others more schematic in nature Kay and Fillmore’s... restricted, at least from the socio-cultural point of view (Wee and Tan, 2008) Indeed, most of the research involving this model has mainly been interested in psycholinguistic processes and how human experiences are manifested in 18 language Related studies have attempted to understand productivity and how it aids in the learning of specific constructions, especially in the context of child language acquisition... how and Standard English how should be made While the Standard English how aims to elicit information about the way something was done, CSE how typically directs a question at the listener to approximately mean what are you going to do about this? I will discuss CSE how in detail in Chapter 5 35 By using how, the speaker expresses the post-sekali utterance as a ‘quandary’, in turn inviting the addressee... The main distinction lies in the fact that counterfactuals include 25 past-time statements, often realized in Standard English using the past subjunctive, as illustrated in (26) below: (26) If he had bought ham, I would have made sandwiches In the case of (26), the counterfactual interpretation is signaled by having the verb of the suppositional clause in the past perfect tense and that of the main clause... construction By comparing some of its grammaticality/ungrammaticality with the so construction in the English language and the lucky construction in CSE, I showed that it raises interesting questions about utterance interpretation that require answering In this chapter, I follow up upon these questions and discuss the sekali construction in greater detail, focusing specifically on its semantic and distributional... their own in order to reach an acceptable interpretation of these utterances This does not lie in the semantics of sekali per se, but the individual’s knowledge of the world influencing his/her judgments, in turn affecting his/her ability to construct a relevant context The concepts of ‘stealing’ and ‘gambling’ for example are more easily associated than ‘stealing’ and ‘passing exams’ This explains why... connector in CSE The first is the fact that sekali does not interfere with the content meaning of each of the utterances it links In a way, this is expected due to the fact that as a syntactic category, discourse connectives can only serve a single function in the discourse – in this case to coherently link two units of discourse together (Fraser, 1990) In line with Sperber and Wilson’s (1995) understanding... utterance containing sekali, as long as sekali is used in an utterance initial position This is typically realized using a prosodic pause or discourse device that differentiates it from utterances such as (33) Interestingly, this can be overruled when a subordinate conjunction but is introduced into the sentence: 31 (34) John and Mary hate each other now but sekali they fall in love (35) Jack is planning to... context refers to a physical scenario that both interlocutors are currently experiencing at the point of speaking In (38), the non-spoken context is the World Cup match that both interlocutors are watching In this instance, both speakers are aware that the probability of a goal being scored during the final minutes of a soccer match is extremely low, but certainly plausible The post-sekali remark is therefore ... of expressing unexpectedness in CSE This is followed by Chapter 7, which consolidates the discussion in the previous chapter and links the findings in this study to similar findings found in. .. borrow books how? A distinction between CSE how and Standard English how should be made While the Standard English how aims to elicit information about the way something was done, CSE how typically... combine to form newer ones Also, in line with the claims of the constructional approach, no construction is more central in terms of its role in creating and expressing meaning While the intuitions