Encoding complex speech acts via sentence final particles: New evidence from the Changsha dialect (Xiang Chinese)

This paper examines the use of the sentence final particle tai (呔) in the Changsha dialect (Xiang Chinese). It is demonstrated that tai encodes complex speech acts: on the one hand, it expresses the speaker’s high degree of certainty about the truth value of the associated proposition p; on the other, it seeks the addressee’s confirmation, via an implicitly entailed biased question, of the truth value of p. In view of the discursive interplay between the speaker and the addressee expressed by tai, the present study adopts a syntax-pragmatics interface approach to the syntax of tai, decomposing the complex speech acts it conveys into three functional projections at the structural level. Two are related to the speaker’s and the addressee’s knowledge/belief in the utterance (i.e., Ground_SpkrP and Ground_AdrP) and one is responsible for the speaker’s call on the addressee to confirm (i.e., ResponseP). This study contributes to cross-linguistic investigations on the grammatical realization of complex speech acts, an area which remains in its infancy. Tai represents a new type of grammatical strategy for expressing complex speech acts, that is, to encode the speaker’s commitment and the addressee’s engagement via a single lexical element without any particular intonation pattern. Copyright © 2024 Department of English, National Taiwan Normal University.