You “fear” or are just “worried”? The licensing conditions for the fear verbs geng 1 and paa 3 in Cantonese

‘Fear’ verbs, as a sub-category of psych-verbs, have received increasing attention in the past few decades. A majority of these studies have been devoted to the investigation of the syntaxsemantics mapping of ‘fear’ verbs, particularly how different syntactic mechanisms are responsible to account for the semantic distinctions of ‘fear’ verbs (Belletti and Rizzi 1988; Grimshaw 1990; Pesetsky 1995; among others), as well as how ‘fear’ verbs are categorized according to their semantic features (Arad 1998; Putstejovsky 1991; Pylkkänen 2000; among others).

Our present study extends beyond previous works on ‘fear’ verbs, which have mostly been on English and other Indo-European languages, to examine how ‘fear’ verbs in Cantonese develop into epistemic mood markers. In particular, this paper illustrates how paa 3 ‘fear’ in Cantonese has evolved to serve as a subjective epistemic and inferential marker equivalent to the English adverb probably. Paa3 ‘fear’ as a lexical verb is used to express the psychological state or emotion of ‘fear’. It has also come to express a weaker sense of ‘fear’, as in the meaning of ‘worry’ or even ‘I’m afraid’. In fact, this pathway ‘I fear’ > ‘I worry/I’m afraid’ is also attested in other languages, including English and Greek (Kitis 2009a, 2009b). What is interesting about the Cantonese paa 3 ‘fear’ is that a subjective epistemic reading has emerged from the more general sense of ‘fear/worry/anxiety’, and served to indicate the high likelihood or probability that an event will occur, often an undesirable one. For instance, native speakers of Cantonese would interpret Nei5 paa3 jau6 ci4 -dou3 (lit. you fear again late) as ‘You, I’m afraid, will be late’ > ‘You probably will be late’, but never as ‘You’re afraid you’ll be late’. The evaluative interpretation is essentially subjective. Our paper addresses in what context this subjective epistemic meaning ‘probably’ has emerged, and under what syntactic and semantic conditions that paa 3 ‘fear’ is used to mean ‘I fear’, ‘I’m afraid’, or ‘probably’.

With reference to our corpora data, comprising transcriptions of 35 hours of films produced in the 1950s’ and 29 hours of spontaneous daily conversations recorded in the 2000s’, it is found that another ‘fear’ verb geng 1 has gradually come to replace paa 3 to express the senses of ‘I fear’ and ‘I’m afraid’ in daily Cantonese interactions. Our paper also attempts to account for why such phenomenon emerges, and further explain the difference with regard to the licensing conditions for the two fear verbs in Cantonese.