On Non-verbal Kóngs in Taiwanese

Abstract

This paper provides a fine-grained analysis of Taiwanese non-verbal kongs and points out that there are at least three different kongs in Taiwanese. A complementizer immediately follows a verb representing communication or a cognitive state and is semantically vacuous; the intra-sentential kong is a topic marker in a CP, which can raise to the sentence-initial position to express additional illocutionary force; and the sentence-final kong is an evidential marker (Chang, 1998; Hsieh & Sybesma, 2007). The sentence-final kong is generated in the left periphery of an IP, but not in the conventional CP domain.Topic markers are also found in Japanese and Korean, but, unlike Taiwanese kongs, they occur lower than the complementizer. The homonymous topic marker and evidential marker found in Taiwanese is not a unique case. In Japanese, there is also a sentence-final evidential marker, which is homonymous with the intra-sentential topic marker. This coincidence may indicate similar grammaticalization processes in these two languages, respectively.