Encoding complex speech acts via sentence final particles

Abstract This paper examines the use of the sentence final particle tai ( 呔 ) in the Changsha dialect (Xiang Chinese). It is demonstrated that tai encodes complex speech acts: on the one hand, it expresses the speaker’s high degree of certainty about the truth value of the associated proposition p ; on the other, it seeks the addressee’s confirmation, via an implicitly entailed biased question, of the truth value of p . In view of the discursive interplay between the speaker and the addressee expressed by tai , the present study adopts a syntax-pragmatics interface approach to the syntax of tai , decomposing the complex speech acts it conveys into three functional projections at the structural level. Two are related to the speaker’s and the addressee’s knowledge/belief in the utterance (i.e., Ground Spkr P and Ground Adr P) and one is responsible for the speaker’s call on the addressee to confirm (i.e., ResponseP). This study contributes to cross-linguistic investigations on the grammatical realization of complex speech acts, an area which remains in its infancy. Tai represents a new type of grammatical strategy for expressing complex speech acts, that is, to encode the speaker’s commitment and the addressee’s engagement via a single lexical element without any particular intonation pattern.