External information processing versus property ascertaining: a discourse-pragmatic study of three yes/no question particles in Shishan (Hainan Island, China)

Drawing on naturally occurring conversation, the present study examines three utterance-final yes/no question particles, mi, o, and ang, in Shishan, a dialect of Lingao of the Tai-Kadai language family, spoken on northern Hainan Island (China). Both mi and o signal the proposition as deriving from an external information source ( primarily preceding discourse). Mi marks simple, linear knowledge accruement/thought progression, based on external information, including plain registration of new information and simple inference. O signals conflicts between externally derived information vis-à-vis the speaker’s pre-existing knowledge/expectation. Ang constructs a genuine query for unknown information, ascertaining whether the quality/characteristic, as coded in the predicate of the utterance, can ascribe to (i.e., ascribable as a property of ) the entity represented by the sentential subject. The meaning of “property ascertaining” gives rise to the use of ang in various presequences.