Verbal irony in Hong Kong Cantonese with mirative evidentials wo3 喎 and lo1 囉

Abstract

Previous research shows speakers tend to use specific prosodic cues, such as lower pitch, when expressing irony in non-tone languages, such as English. Observation of Hong Kong Cantonese (HKC) discourse-markers, known as sentence-final particles (SFPs), suggests they may also be used by speakers to communicate irony as well. This is because previous studies have suggested that the large number of contrastive tones in the HKC lexical tone system restricts the extent to which speakers can superimpose intonation on the lexical tones; therefore, SFPs are perceived as commonplace and crucial pragmatic markers. Yet, up to the present time there has been no in-depth research studying how verbal irony is encoded in SFPs in HKC. To try to fill in this research gap, the present study has investigated whether HKC speakers use the two SFPs wo3 and lo1 to express irony when they function as mirative evidentials. This study has hypothesised that mirative evidentials are associated with irony because (i) the presupposition of communicating irony matches that of using evidentiality, i.e., a speaker who makes ironic remarks needs prior information of the state of affairs in order to comment on the situation, whereas a speaker who uses evidentials means s/he has prior information of the state of affairs that s/he is reporting to another interlocutor; and (ii) the motivation for a speaker to produce an ironic utterance aligns with the value of mirativity, i.e., the state of affairs mismatches the speaker’s expectation. To determine whether there is an association between mirative evidentials and irony, the researcher recruited 24 native HKC speakers (mean age = 22.3) to participate in an experiment that required them to respond verbally to a questionnaire. The questionnaire includes a set of stories with three multiple-choice answers that have the same base utterance but differs by one SFP. The analysis of the experimental result confirmed the hypothesis; the subjects frequently used wo3 and lo1 in ironic scenarios than in non-ironic scenarios. The experiment also yielded an unexpected result; the speakers exhibited acoustic features different from the non-ironic utterances when expressing irony, i.e., rising pitch and prolongation of the SFPs. This additional finding shows that HKC speakers combine attitudinal intonational patterns with the lexical tones of SFPs in order to convey pragmatic function, such as irony.