Could be stronger: Raising and resolving questions with Hindi =to
Ashwini Deo
April 2022 

Hindi and several other Indo-Aryan languages contain a discourse marker that has been described as having a wide range of functions including (contrastive) topic marking, intensive, emphatic, contrastive, assertive. In Hindi, this function is realized by the enclitic particle =to. Possible English translational equivalents for Hindi =to include discourse markers like in fact, sure, you know, well, as for, at least, finally, but. This paper investigates the diverse uses of =to and argues that the full range can be uniformly accounted for only if =to is taken to be a particle that signals that the question resolved by its prejacent is weak. The analysis treats =to as a generalized downtoner that comments on the strength of the question that the prejacent addresses, relative to the speaker’s information state, prior discourse moves, and assumptions about the common ground.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/006473 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	To appear in Language
keywords:	discourse particles, formal pragmatics, current question, indo-aryan, semantics
previous versions:	v1 [February 2022]
Downloaded:	427 times

 

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