A variably exhaustive and scalar focus particle and pragmatic focus concord in Burmese

Abstract

The Burmese particle hmá expresses cleft-like exhaustivity in some contexts but a scalar, even-like meaning in other contexts. We propose that hmá is uniformly a not-at-issue scalar exhaustive, with semantics similar to that proposed for English it-clefts in Velleman, Beaver, Destruel, Bumford, Onea & Coppock 2012. When hmá takes wide scope, it leads to an exhaustive interpretation which is not scale-sensitive. When hmá takes scope under negation, the resulting expression will have a scale-sensitive felicity condition due to a Non-Vacuity constraint. We show that hma makes reference to alternatives ordered by likelihood, but cannot use other contextual orderings such as rank-orders. We also analyze the sentence-final mood marker ta/da, which frequently but not always appears in scalar hmá utterances, in a manner similar to focus concord effects in other languages. We propose that ta/da is a marker of propositional clefts and argue that the semantics of hmá and the pragmatic requirements of propositional clefts together derive this apparent focus concord effect, as well as its exceptions. Mar Aung for sharing their language with us. We also thank Chris Davis, Hadas Kotek, and Elin McCready, the audience at SALT 28, and our S&P reviewers and editor Judith Ton-hauser for helpful comments and discussion. We thank Meghan Lim for assistance in verifying our transcriptions. The first author led the analysis and writing and the second author led all data collection.