Questioning speech acts

Abstract

We investigate the sentence-final particle ho from Cantonese, which can stack on topof other sentence-final particles indicating various types of speech acts. We argue that ho is ahigher level question operator that operates at the level of speech acts. More concretely, it takesa speech act (assertion or question) and returns a new interrogative speech act asking whether theinput speech act can be felicitously performed by the addressee. We take the presence of thiskind of higher level question operator in natural language as novel evidence that a mechanism foroperating on speech acts is needed. Building on Farkas and Bruce (2009), Rawlins (2010), Bledinand Rawlins (2017), we develop a mechanism in the style of Update Semantics for operating onspeech acts.Keywords: speech acts, sentence-final particles, Cantonese, update semantics.