Cover not available
Part of
Information-Structural Perspectives on Discourse Particles
Edited by Pierre-Yves Modicom and Olivier Duplâtre
[Studies in Language Companion Series 213] 2020
► pp. 251–276

Chapter 10
The discourse marker hani in Turkish

| Bogazici University
| Bogazici University
This study is dedicated to the Turkish discourse marker hani, which exhibits three kinds of use. It appears in interrogative sentences with a wh-question intonation. In these cases, the use of hani indicates that the context provides counter evidence for the belief /expectations of the speaker and the speaker demands an account for it from the hearer. Hani also appears at the beginning of clauses ending with the particle ya. Those utterances are questions demanding an answer from the hearer and reminding the speaker’s belief or expectation, which the hearer is expected to corroborate. Finally, hani can appear in declarative clauses expressing the same value of reminding the hearer of a belief of the speaker. The common core of all three uses is the notion of shared knowledge: hani is used for the sake of Common Ground management. Drawing on previous research on negative polar questions as well as inner negation and outer negation in questions, we show that utterances including hani with wh-question intonation involve a negation and a question operator and show an “inner negation” reading. Hani… ya utterances are compatible with the outer negation reading of negative polar questions and demand neutral contexts or positive evidence. Declarative hani is incompatible with contexts that provide negative evidence, but felicitous in neutral and positive contexts.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous research on hani
  • 3.Negated polar questions
  • 4.Negative polar questions and hani constructions
    • 4.1Hani constructions with wh-intonation
    • 4.2Hani constructions with the particle ya
    • 4.3Hani constructions with declarative intonation
  • 5.The difference between hani constructions and negative polar questions
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • List of abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 4 March 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.213.10aka
References (27)
References
Abraham, Werner. 1991. Discourse particles in German: How does their illocutive force come about? In Discourse Particles: Descriptive and Theoretical Investigations on the Logical, Syntactic and Pragmatic Properties of Discourse Particles in German [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 12], Werner Abraham (ed.), 203–252. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
AnderBois, Scott. 2019. Negation, alternatives, and negative polar questions in American English. In Questions in Discourse, Klaus von Heusinger, Edgar Onea & Malte Zimmerman (eds), 118–171. Leiden: Brill. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Büring, Daniel & Gunlogson, Christine. 2000. Aren’t positive and negative polar questions the same? Ms. <[URL]> (14 October 2019).
Clauson, Gerard. 1972. “ka:ñu:” In An Etymological Dictionary of Pre-thirteenth-century Turkish, p. 632. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Cohen, Ariel & Krifka, Manfred. 2011. Superlative quantifiers as modifiers of meta-speech acts. The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication 6: 1–56.Google Scholar
Egg, Markus. 2010. A unified account of the semantics of discourse particles. In Proceedings of SIGDIAL 2010, 132–138.Google Scholar
. 2012. Discourse particles at the semantics-pragmatics interface. In Modality and Theory of Mind Elements across Languages, Werner Abraham & Elisabeth Leiss (eds), 297–333. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Erguvanlı Taylan, Eser. 2000. Semi-grammaticalized modality in Turkish. In Studies on Turkish and Turkic Languages, Aslı Göksel & Celia Kerslake (eds), 113–143. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.Google Scholar
Fraser, Bruce 2009. An Account of discourse markers. International Review of Pragmatics (1): 1–27. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Göksel, Aslı, Kelepir, Meltem & Üntak-Tarhan, Aslı. 2009. Decomposition of question intonation: The structure of response seeking utterances. In Phonological Domains: Universals and Deviations, Janet Grijzenhout & Barış Kabak (eds), 249–296. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hedberg, Nancy. 2004. On the meaning and intonation of polar questions. Talk given at the UBC Colloquium.
Hudson, Richard A. 1975. The meaning of questions. Language 51: 1–31. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Karagjosova, Elena. 2004. The Meaning and Function of German Modal Particles. PhD dissertation, Universität des Saarlandes.Google Scholar
Kelepir, Meltem. 2001. Topics in Turkish Syntax: Clausal Structure and Scope. PhD dissertation, MIT.Google Scholar
König, Ekkehard. 1997. Zur Bedeutung von Modalpartikeln im Deutschen: Ein Neuansatz im Rahmen der Relevanztheorie. Germanistische Linguistik 136: 57–75.Google Scholar
Krifka, Manfred. 2008. Basic notions of infomation structure. Acta Linguistica Hungarica 55(3–4): 243–276. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2017. Negated polarity questions as denegations of assertions. In Contrastiveness in Information Structure, Alternatives and Scalar Implicatures, Chungmin Lee, Ferenc Kiefer & Manfred Krifka (eds), 359–398. Dordrecht: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ladd, Robert D. 1981. A first look at the semantics and pragmatics of negative questions and tag questions. In Papers from the Seventeenth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, Robera A. Hendrick, Carrie S. Masek & Mary Frances Miller (eds), 164–171. Chicago IL: CLS.Google Scholar
Özge, Duygu, Marinis, Theodoros & Zeyrek, Deniz. 2010. Production of relative clauses in monolingual Turkish children. In Proceedings of the 34th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Proceedings Supplement, Jane Chandlee, Katie Franich, Kate Iserman & Lauren Keil (eds). Somerville MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Romero, Maribel & Han, Chung-Hye. 2004. On negative yes/no questions. Linguistics & Philosophy 27: 609–658. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rullmann, Hotze & Matthewson, Lisa. 2012. Epistemic modals can scope under past tense. Paper presented at the Texas Linguistic Society, 24 June. <[URL]> (14 October 2019).
Stalnaker, Robert. 2002. Common ground. Linguistics & Philosophy 25: 701–721. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sudo, Yasutada. 2013. Biased polar questions in English and Japanese. In Beyond Expressives: Explorations in Use-Conditional Meaning, Daniel Gutzmann & Hans-Martin Gärtner, 275–295. Leiden: Brill. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
von Fintel, Kai & Gillies, Anthony S.. 2008. CIA leaks. The Philosophical Review 17(1): 77–98. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zeevat, Henk. 2004. Particles: Presupposition triggers, context markers, or speech act markers? In Optimality Theory and Pragmatics, Reinhard Blutner & Henk Zeevat (eds), 91–111. Houndmills: Palgrave. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zeijlstra, Hedde. 2008. Negative concord is syntactic agreement. Ms, University of Amsterdam. <[URL]> (14 October 2019).
Zimmermann, Malte. 2011. Discourse particles. In Semantics: an international handbook of natural language meaning, Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger & Paul Portner (eds), 2011–2038. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Cited by (3)

Cited by three other publications

KURAM, Kadri
2023. Semi-grammaticalized and Pragmatic Means of Common Ground Management in Turkish. Dil Araştırmaları 17:33 ► pp. 71 ff. DOI logo
Shan, Yi
2021. Investigating the Interaction Between Prosody and Pragmatics Quantitatively: A Case Study of the Chinese Discourse Marker ni zhidao (“You Know”). Frontiers in Psychology 12 DOI logo
Shan, Yi
2023. A Domain-Function Analysis of ni zhidao (你知道, “You Know”) in Chinese Simultaneous Speech. SAGE Open 13:4 DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 june 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.