Pragmatic functions of versatile unsa ‘what’ in Cebuano: From interrogative pronoun to placeholder to stance marker

Abstract

This study examines the referential and nonreferential uses of unsa ‘what’ expressions in Cebuano, including accompanying enclitics, if any, the kind of context or situation in which the expression is uttered, and whether the ‘what’ expression is part of the uttered statement or syntactically disjunct from the rest of the utterance, as well as the pathways in which these expressions have extended their use and meaning. The data used in this study consisted of five approximately thirty-minute long casual conversations between friends. The data show that the ‘what’-word unsa is used not only as an interrogative pronoun to seek information but also as an indefinite pronoun; it has also evolved into a placeholder, an idiomatic expression, and a discourse marker. In terms of form, they may be nominal (or part of a noun phrase), verbal (or part of the predicate), or disjunctive (i.e., independent from the main clause). More than half of the time (55%), unsa does not occur with any aspectual or modal particle, while almost two-fifths of unsa tokens (39%) are realized with the mitigating enclitic = man to tone down the force of a question. Similar to Lee et al. (2017), there is a tendency for these ‘what’-expressions to express the speaker's negative stance, especially in the rhetorical idiomatic unsa phrases. In this paper, specific morphosyntactic environments have been identified in relation to the epistemic and (dis)affiliative speaker stance uses of unsa.