On the Contextual Constraints of Counter-Expectation Marker and Its Use in Shanghai Dialect-Mandarin Bidialectals: An...

The present study investigated how Shanghai dialect-Mandarin bidialectal speakers comprehend and produce sentences with a specific counter-expectation marker papa in their first language, the Shanghai dialect. Papa leads a complex sentence, as in "papa being a senior doctor, he cannot perform such an easy surgery", with the subordinating clause entailing the speakers' expectation and the main clause describing the reality which is contrary to the speakers' expectation. Different from other counter-expectation markers which generally license the violation of speakers' expectedness, the use of papa is restricted to a context which typically encodes a positive expectation being dissatisfied. In two experiments, we aimed to investigate how specific contexts influence bidialectal Shanghai dialect speakers' comprehension and production of papa complex sentences. In the comprehension task, participants were instructed to judge the contextual felicitousness of complex sentences containing papa, which featured an event that was either consistent or inconsistent with the counter-expectation constraint and used in either positive or negative evaluative context. Sentences in the consistent or positive conditions were judged to be more felicitous than their inconsistent or negative counterparts, highlighting the influence of both the counter-expectation constraint and the evaluative context. In the production task, participants were asked to complete sentences with only subordinating or the main clause provided. The results showed that participants demanded more time to plan sentences in negative evaluative contexts. Subsequent semantic coding of adversative and expectation types revealed that participants preferred to produce sentences with explicit adversative relationships in positive than negative contexts, while they favored sentences with under-expectation relationships in neutral contexts. These findings suggest an "under-expectation bias" in the use of papa complex sentences, indicating a selectivity to a specific direction of counter-expectation relationships. This suggests that new usages of counter-expectation marker can emerge from particular contexts. Such under-expectation bias could be related to papa's communicative function to express sarcasm.