I have shown that the use of cơ marks the existence of a contrasting proposition earlier in the discourse. This explains why we interpret a sentence containing cơ as introducing an inference regarding some contrasting proposition. Consider example (10). The utterance in (10) asserts that Minh bought a certain cat at a certain store. At the same time, the use of cơ with focus marking on the demonstrative này ‘this’ of the object ‘cat’ introduces an inference about some other cat.3
(10) Minh mua con mèo [này]F ở cửa hàng này cơ
M. buy CL cat [this]F at store this CƠ
‘Minh bought this cat at this store.’
↝ (The speaker thinks) Minh did not buy some other cat at this store.’
When stress is placed on another constituent, the demonstrative này ‘this’ of the locative as in (11), a different inference pertaining to some other store is drawn.
(11) Minh mua con mèo này ở cửa hàng [này]F cơ
M. buy CL cat this at store [this]F CƠ
‘Minh bought this cat at this store.’
↝ (The speaker thinks) Minh did not buy the cat at some other store.’
This variation in interpretation of cơ in (10) and (11) correlating with the placement of focus suggests that the corrective cơ is focus sensitive. Skeptical cơ has a very similar behavior as illustrated in items (12) and (13).
(12) Minh mua [con mèo nào] ở cửa hàng này cơ Minh buy CL cat which at store this CƠ ‘Minh bought WHICH cat at this store?’
↝ The speaker doesn’t believe that Minh bought a particular cat at the store. (13) Minh mua con mèo này ở [cửa hàng nào] cơ
Minh buy CL cat this at store which CƠ ‘Minh bought this cat at WHICH store?’
↝ The speaker doesn’t believe that Minh bought the cat at a particular store.
The presence of skeptical cơ allows the speaker to convey his skepticism about a contrasting proposition in the previous discourse. In (12), when the wh-constituent is the DP con mèo nào ‘which cat,’ the speaker’s skepticism relates to some particular cat mentioned previously. In contrast, in (13) when the place where Minh bought the cat is in question, the utterance expresses skepticism about the cat being purchased at some particular location. In other words, skeptical cơ is sensitive to the position of wh-constituents.
To sum up, I have presented the main properties of cơ, through which we can see how closely related its two uses are. Both uses are subject to certain distributional constraints: the prior discourse must include a contrasting proposition which the speaker believes to be false. I also presented another parallel between corrective cơ and skeptical cơ, namely, their interpretations are sensitive to the position of focus and wh-constituents, respectively. An adequate formalization for cơ therefore must encode these various requirements.
3 Proposal
In this section, I will provide a formalization for the particle based on the generalization in the previous section using the Mats Rooth’s Alternative Semantics framework for the interpretation of focus and Craige Roberts’ theory of discourse as organized into a set of moves.
First, consider the sensitivity of the particle to the position of focus and wh-constituents. The focus sensitivity of corrective cơ suggests that the particle, like others that associate with focus, should be theoretically treated as quantifying over a set of alternatives determined by the position of focus (Rooth 1985, 1992). This approach can also be naturally extended to skeptical cơ in wh-interrogatives, which descriptively reflects a sensitivity to the position of wh-constituents. The semantics of questions is also
Papers from Chula-ISSSEAL – Nguyen
140
standardly treated as denoting a set of alternatives (Hamblin 1958; Karttunen 1977; von Stechow 1991; Beck 2006; Kotek 2014, 2016). Therefore, the particle’s two uses can be unified as referencing a contrasting proposition that belongs to the alternative set determined by focus-marking or a wh- constituent.
The felicity conditions of cơ also require that the contrasting proposition is previously mentioned in the discourse. This part of meaning “previously mentioned” can be encoded using Roberts’ (1996) organization of discourse structure into a set of moves. The contrasting proposition must be a discourse move in the set of moves prior to the point that cơ is uttered.
I propose the semantics for the sentence-final particle cơ as follows. ⟦α cơ⟧ has the at-issue content of ⟦α⟧ and introduces the not-at-issue meaning in (14):4
(14) [α cơ] ↝ ∃p . ( p ∈ M and (i)
p ∈ ⟦α⟧f and (ii)
the speaker believes that p is false ) (iii)
Here, M is the set of previous discourse moves (Roberts, 1996) prior to cơ’s utterance. The focus alternative set ⟦α⟧f is the set of all interpretations obtained by replacing all the F-marked constituents in
α, which can be a focus (Rooth 1992) or a wh constituent (Roberts 1996), with contextually-determined alternatives.
4 Analysis
The main focus of this section is to re-examine the examples in Section 2 with respect to the proposed semantics for the particle cơ above. I will first demonstrate that the proposal can account for the felicity of the particle. Then, I will discuss how this proposal accurately rules out the use of cơ in the infelicitous conversations, motivating each clause of the not-at-issue content in the proposal above. Lastly, I will show that the proposal accounts for the correlation between the interpretation of the particle with the placement of focus and wh-constituents.