Epistemic indefinites in Cantonese

A recent line of research concerns how an existential claim is bundled with a modal component — in particular, one relating to speakers’ ignorance — in the nominal domain. The primary focus of this paper is to discuss a case of epistemic indefinites in Cantonese which takes the form of m-zi-WH ‘not-know-WH’. I argue for two claims in this paper. First, I propose that mzi is an (overt) choice function operator that binds wh -expressions and disjunctive expressions. Second, I suggest that the ignorance component associated with mzi is a conventional implicature, representing a new type of the ignorance component for epistemic indefinites. I also discuss a potential grammaticalization path of m-zi , connecting its syntactic distribution to its semantic properties. The findings in this paper uncover a new breed of epistemic indefinites and contributes to our understanding of both the interpretation of wh -expressions in Cantonese and the study of how natural languages encode an ignorance component in nominal expressions.