Ho2 as a Talk Coordinator in Cantonese Conversations ── A Discourse-Pragmatic Perspective

This paper examines how the utterance-final particle ho2 in Cantonese contributes to the management of local and global coherence in conversational discourse. Ho2 is traditionally subcategorized as an interrogative particle and described as a coaxing particle to turn the host sentence into a yes-no question (Yau 1980). Ho2 is biased in nature and when it is used to ask a question, the speaker has a certain presupposition in mind, and would expect from the hearer some kind of positive reply, including an agreement or a confirmation (Matthews and Yip 1994; Li et al 1995; Fang 2004; Peng 2010; among others). In other words, a secondary act of confirmation seeking is often always performed on top of the primary act of questioning.

While recent studies such as Wong et. al (2013) and Lam (2014) have analyzed the uses of ho2 from syntactic perspectives, our present paper analyzes the uses of ho2 from a discoursepragmatic perspective, using Schiffrin’s (1987) model of discourse coherence. Based on data obtained from Cantonese corpora,1 we show how ho2 can be used as an interactional particle, both at the local level involving adjacency pairs and at the more global level involving speaker’s intersubjective stance and interactional goals. We show how ho2 , as an information-seeking particle, is frequently recruited as an affirmation-seeking and solidarity-enhancing device. Special attention is given to the extended uses of ho2 in terms of Schiffrin’s exchange and action structures, as well as participation frameworks and information states, with our analysis highlighting how speakers effectively use ho2 to convey their (inter)subjective footing and in the process negotiate meaningful affiliative/disaffiliative interaction among interlocutors, and in so doing achieve discourse coherence for effective communication.