Particles of (Un)expectedness: Cantonese Wo and Lo

Cantonese has a number of sentence-final particles which serve various communicative functions. This paper looks into two of the most frequently used particles, wo3 and lo1. We propose that wo3 and lo1 are expressive items: Wo3 indicates unexpectedness of the propositional content or the current discourse move, while lo1 indicates expectedness of the propositional content or the current discourse move. We employ Default Logic to characterize the notion of (un)expectedness by normality conditionals. The analysis has a further implication on the Gricean Cooperative Principle in that the use of wo3 and lo1 makes reference to the general world knowledge which includes conditions on how the discourse should normally proceed.