Abstract Several studies have shown that phasal polarity expressions, such as ‘already’ and ‘still’, tend to have various semantic and pragmatic extensions. This paper provides new data from Totoli, a western Austronesian language from Central Sulawesi (Indonesia), where phasal polarity expressions are also polysemous and polyfunctional. Besides the clitics = mo ‘already’ and = po ‘still’, which can be found in a cognate form in other Austronesian languages, Totoli exhibits a third clitic, = ga , which is rarely reported in the Austronesianist literature. What is particularly interesting about =ga is that its meanings seem to overlap with those of both =mo and = po . This paper analyzes the semantics of the three clitics, with a special focus on their areas of overlap. It proposes that the semantic and functional overlap has to do with the notion of restriction and that lexical aspect, and possibly exhaustivity, play an important role in the interpretation and disambiguation of the clitics’ meanings.
Maria Bardají i Farré (Mon,) studied this question.