A variably exhaustive and scalar focus particle and pragmatic focus concord in Burmese

Abstract

The Burmese particle hma expresses cleft-like exhaustivity in some contexts but a scalar, even -like meaning in other contexts. We propose that hma is uniformly a not-at-issue scalar exhaustive, with semantics similar to that proposed for English it -clefts in Velleman, Beaver, Destruel, Bumford, Onea & Coppock 2012. When hma takes wide scope, it leads to an exhaustive interpretation which is not scale-sensitive. When hma takes scope under negation, the resulting expression will have a scale-sensitive felicity condition due to a Non-Vacuity constraint. We show that hma makes reference to alternatives ordered by likelihood, but cannot use other contextual orderings such as rank-orders. We also analyze the sentence-final mood marker ta/da , which frequently but not always appears in scalar hma utterances, in a manner similar to focus concord effects in other languages. We propose that ta/da is a marker of propositional clefts and argue that the semantics of hma and the pragmatic requirements of propositional clefts together derive this apparent focus concord effect, as well as its exceptions. EARLY ACCESS