‘ Janee . No , I ' m fine ’ : A note on YES and NO in South Africa

This paper considers some unusual uses of NO and YES observed in South African English (SAE) and other languages spoken in South Africa. Our objective is to highlight the fundamentally speaker-hearer-oriented nature of many of these elements, and to offer a formal perspective on their use. We also aim to highlight the value of pursuing more detailed investigations of these and other perspectival elements employed in SAE and other languages spoken in South Africa.


Introduction 1
Our point of departure in this note is the peculiarity of South African English (SAE) illustrated in (1): (1) A: How are you?

B:
No, I'm fine.
For South Africans, this sequence is an entirely unremarkable interaction-initiating conversational routine.For many English speakers elsewhere, though, the no in the response constitutes a surprising element, initially leading to concern that all is not well, which is then, however, immediately reversed.Our purpose here is, firstly, to make an initial suggestion as to how SAE's "illogical" routinised greeting may be understood in pragmatic (section 2) and also formal (section 3) terms; secondly, to offer some further supporting evidence in support of this initial proposal (section 4), and, finally, in conclusion, to highlight the potential importance of the resulting perspective for our understanding of SAE and South African colloquial varieties more generally (section 5).

Making sense of SAE NO in No, I'm fine
No in (1) at first sight does not seem to mean "no": B explicitly states that they are fine, i.e. a positive state of affairs, and A also did not ask a negatively biased question that might call for an initial denial by the addressee of negative speaker-bias of some kind (see discussion of (10) below).In fact, the usual expectation in this instance of phatic communication (Malinowski 1923) is for respondents to offer a stock-positive rather than genuine response: so, for example, just I'm fine, even if this is not actually the case.Also relevant is the fact that A's question takes the form of a so-called constituent or wh-question, i.e. a narrow-focus question that cannot be felicitously answered by either yes or no.Consider the constituent questions in (2-3) in this connection:2 (2) A: What are you reading?B: ♯Yes./♯No./Oosthuizen(2012).
When we are dealing with wh-questions -which also include the how-question in (1) -neither yes nor no can actually answer the question posed, raising the question of what the no in (1) is doing in the structure to begin with.This, then, is our first question.
Yes and no do constitute felicitous answers to so-called polar or yes/no-questions.And here, yes means "yes" and no means "no" in SAE, just as it does in other varieties.In (4), for example, these elements provide a positive or negative reply to the initial question (as indicated in parentheses, this "real" yes/no can be thought of as an affirmation or negation of the statement corresponding to the original question; we return to this point below): (4) A: Are you going to join us?B: Yes, we're just locking up the office./No,we have a squib to finish writing.
Here again, though, SAE speakers can harness no in what seem for at least some (see below) non-SAE English speakers to be surprising ways.Consider the following attested examples:3 (5) A: Are you okay?B: No, I'm fine.
(6) [Scenario: A is concerned that C (='she') may not be able to make it to a special dinner that had been arranged in honour of a close friend of C's.A therefore consults B for her views on the likelihood of C making it to the dinner on time.] A: Is she going to make it?B: No, I think she will.
In both cases, B responds with a no that cannot be interpreted as a response to the yes/noquestions that was actually asked: in (5), B's response is interpreted as "Yes, I'm okay.", which is also what our British informants indicate that they would say in response to this question. 4Similarly, the response in ( 6) is understood as "Yes, I think she will.".
The question that arises, then, is why SAE speakers can seemingly say no so readily when they actually don't mean either yes or no (cases like (1)), and, even more confusingly, when they actually mean "yes" (cases like ( 5) and ( 6)).
Our proposal is that the no in (1), ( 5) and ( 6) is in fact not the regular anaphoric negator that features in answers to yes/no-questions (see Holmberg 2016 for recent overview discussion and references).Instead, this no is directed at the addressee -A in the above examples: what the speaker -B in each example -intends is "No, don't worry". 5In other words, the three SAE examples we have been considering are to be interpreted as follows: (1) A: How are you?B: No, (don't worry:) I'm fine.
(6) [Scenario: A is concerned that C (='she') may not be able to make it to a special dinner that had been arranged in honour of a close friend of C's.A therefore consults B for her views on the likelihood of C making it to the dinner on time.]

A:
Is she going to make it?B: No, (don't worry:) I think she will.
conversational interaction the relevant author was herself involved in, or sent to one of the authors by a (typically naive) native-speaker acquaintance who had been made aware of our interest in no-data of this kind.Those who produced the cited utterances were all South African L1 or L2 English speakers (see section 4 for further discussion of the significance of this fact).. 4 Thanks to the following for their judgements on these and other no-containing structures: Chloe Allenby, Jamie Bailey, Laura Bailey, Tim Bazalgette, Alison Biggs, Jamie Douglas, Rosemary Little, Iain Mobbs, Ian Roberts, Sneha Sen, Michelle Sheehan, Onkar Singh, and Carolyn Twigg.
By contrast, the "real" no in (4) can be thought of as marking the speaker's affirmation or negation of the deictically adjusted version of the statement corresponding to the original question: (4) A: Are you going to join us?B: Yes, we're going to join you: we're just locking up the office.
No, we're not going to join you: we have a squib to finish writing.
On this proposal, then, the SAE "illogical" no is no more "illogical" than the "extra" negation element in negative concord structures.It is simply a different no to that found in the most familiar anaphoric negation contexts: while the anaphoric negator negates a just introduced proposition, the no in (1), ( 5) and ( 6) negates a just introduced (pragmatic) presupposition. 6 To distinguish the two negators, we will refer to the latter as propositional no and the SAE variant under discussion here as presuppositional no.
Importantly, our proposal about presuppositional no makes a number of empirical and theoretical predictions.We highlight only a few of these here.
Firstly, we predict that SAE speakers will only employ presuppositional no in contexts where a hearer-directed "don't worry" or other negative presupposition-cancelling response is warranted, i.e.where it is plausible to assume that the speaker-turned-hearer (A in our examples) initially asked their question out of concern of some kind that the hearer-turnedspeaker (B in our examples) wishes to allay -that is, where there is a negative presupposition of some kind in play.Many yes/no questions, however, do not spring from concern, and are thus predicted not to give rise to a response of this type.Unbiased, true information-seeking yes/no questions, for example, do not do so.Secondly, since the presuppositional no is a response to a pragmatic presupposition -a negative perspective that B ascribes to A -we expect it to be possible even in response to 6 The sense in which presupposition is to be understood here is not the classic semantic sense in terms of which a presupposition is a proposition that is entailed both by a positive clause and by its negation.That is, we are not concerned here with the type of presupposition that is stake when we say that The King of France is bald presupposes the existence of a unique King of France, for example.What we have in mind in referring to presuppositional negation is, instead, pragmatic in nature, specifically discourse participants' expectations about the discourse context in which linguistic structures are used (cf.i.a.Gazdar 1979, Levinson 1983, Horn 1989, Carston 1998, Sweetser 2006, and Nahajec 2012).
questions where a yes or no answer -thus, a propositional yes or no -would not usually be appropriate.Wh-questions are a case in point.Consider again (2) and (3) above: (2) A: What are you reading?B: ♯Yes./♯No./Oosthuizen(2012).
( Importantly, the judgement that ( 9) and (10) are acceptable in the kinds of contexts outlined here seems to be one that is shared by SAE speakers and speakers of other varieties of English.In other words, presuppositional no is not unique to SAE (see i.a.Horn 1989, Carston 1998, Givón 2001, Sweetser 2006, and Nahajec 2012 for discussion of this type of negation in English and other languages).What is unique is its routineization in the phatic context in (1), to which we return below.A preliminary, part questionnaire-, part observationbased comparison with English Englishes 7 also suggests that presuppositional no-initial responses are more generally less marked in SAE than in English Englishes, i.e. that SAE speakers rather readily employ no under circumstances that would not, for English English speakers, constitute a context in which they feel the need to employ a hearer-oriented negative-presupposition canceller.So one of our English English informants, for example, observed in relation to (5) that "I would only say this in contexts where it appeared A was very worried for me, but would otherwise always answer this question with an answer beginning with 'Yes', or some other affirmative.",and, in relation to (6), "I would only say this if A appeared particularly shocked or worried, in order to reassure her by saying 'no'otherwise I would use 'yes' instead".This need for a clear and specific signal that A is concerned in some way is repeatedly highlighted by our informants.For SAE speakers, however, an entirely neutral context, featuring an unbiased yes/no-question and involving no overt indication of speaker concern, also seems to suffice.
Our impression, then, is that SAE speakers, more readily than speakers of English Englishes, take as their point of departure that their interlocutor requires reassurance that a negative presupposition is not justified.In other words, SAE speakers do this as a matter of convention, without there necessarily being any specific indicator in the discourse of a need for concern; SAE speakers, as it were, have a default "just in case you're worried" point of departure, which English English speakers do not typically have.In this connection, the observation of one our English English informants is particularly interesting.Chloe Allenby (p.c.) notes the individual-or personality-driven rather than dialect-or region-specific phenomenon of politeness-driven no-usage where yes is in fact intended.The following (constructed) exchanges, based on Allenby's real experiences with a particularly offenceaware, eager-to-please acquaintance, typifies this usage: (11) a. A: Is that your junk in the kitchen?B: No, I'm tidying it in a minute.

b. A:
Was that you singing at 3am? B: No, I was really drunk.
Here, the answer to the yes/no-questions posed is clearly yes in each case; thus, Yes, it is my junk and Yes, it was me singing at 3am.Like the SAE no, B's no is a hearer-directed presuppositional no; whereas the SAE cases we have considered above are primarily directed at offering reassurance, however, B's nos in (11) have apology/supplication as their primary objective: No, please don't be annoyed.The key point for us is, firstly, that (11) illustrates a further hearer-rather than proposition-oriented use of no, and, secondly, that this use of no is perceived as being typical of speakers with a particular, politeness-driven orientation to their interlocutors.By contrast, the SAE no introduced above seems to be typical of speakers generally, and it also seems to be an unmarked, conventionalised usage, reflecting a default "hearer-concern" perspective.
This putative convention -which we hope to pursue in future work -might at first sight seem to be a matter of language use (performance) rather than language knowledge or what we usually think of as 'grammar' (competence).What we would like to suggest, however, is that SAE speakers' fondness for presuppositional no-containing forms does, in fact, go beyond use, i.e. beyond how frequently they make use of an element that is also, in principle, available to speakers of other varieties.Building on recent generative work that takes seriously the idea that aspects of the discourse context can be "syntacticised", 8 we propose, firstly, that SAE's presuppositional no has a specific grammatical character, which it shares with presuppositional no in other varieties (section 3), and, secondly, that the broader yes/nosystem in SAE is such that we might expect SAE presuppositional no to be bleached relative to its counterpart in familiar standard varieties (section 4).That is, our proposal will be that a grammatical system-based consideration underlies the peculiar usage in ( 1) and (5-6): SAE speakers are able to use no as they do owing to the wider lexico-syntactic make-up of their language.

The grammar of SAE no: the view from modern generative syntax
Contrary to what is often thought, the proposal that grammar encodes more than just "traditional" grammatical notions like subject and object, tense aspect, and mood is well established in generative work.The idea that speakers are formally encoded in the grammar, for example, goes back to Ross's (1970) so-called Performative Hypothesis.In terms of this Hypothesis, every main clause -S at the time -is dominated by a speaker-oriented clause -a silent S, which, for declaratives, was assumed to covertly express something along the lines of I state/declare that ...Although this original proposal faced various difficulties, which led to its falling out of favour during the GB and early minimalist periods, information-structural notions like 'topic' and 'focus' became increasingly important during the 1980s and 1990s.
Rizzi's seminal (1997) paper serves as both an excellent demonstration of how much was learned during this period, and, viewed from our current perspective, of what became possible once this clausal articulation was in place (cf.also Berghoff, this volume, for an illustration of the kind of questions that can be posed about topic-focus-related matters in 2017).This millennium, it has become clear that Ross was -as has so often proven to be the case -correct in thinking of speakers and hearers as further elements to be grammatically encoded within the clausal domain (see Heim and Wiltschko 2017 for recent overview discussion and references ).The picture that seems to be emerging, therefore, is that the well-established clausal tripartition which is schematised and characterised in ( 12) and ( 13) respectively needs to be refined and expanded to include a fourth domain dedicated to the representation of speaker-hearer-related notions, as in ( 14 14) is characterised as the domain of information structure rather than of discourse tout court.This is important as there appear to be good grammatical motivations for distinguishing between the actual "packaging"-of-content component of what we usually think of as 'discourse information', on the one hand, and the expression of speaker-hearer perspectives, on the other.It is, for example, clear that a speaker may choose to encode a given XP as, say, a topic, which may require a particular grammatical configuration (e.g.moving the relevant XP to an appropriate CP-internal projection), and that this is distinct from perspectival information that the speaker may additionally wish to encode, again potentially via some grammatical configuration.Much research this millennium has shown that grammars make distinct grammatical options available to encode these two types of discourse meaning (see again the sources cited above); ( 14) thus reflects the hypothesis that the Discourse domain in fact has a bipartite structure, with a speaker-hearerrelated domain at the very top -a clear return to the ideas of Ross (1970).10 For our purposes, the key point is that the articulation in ( 14) allows us to gain a formal insight into the distinction between "regular" propositional no and the presuppositional no that has been the focus of discussion in section 2. As is by now well known, negation differs from, seemingly, most other syntactically encoded categories in not having a crosslinguistically invariant structural position in the clausal hierarchy (cf.i.a.Zanuttini 1997, Cinque 1999, Poletto 2008, and Biberauer 2017a).Thus neutral sentential negation is located "low" in Germanic (at the edge of vP), in an intermediate position in Romance (within the TP-domain), and "high" in Celtic (within the CP-domain).Additionally, negators may merge at the edge of other XPs to mark non-neutral/focused negation.For example, in English [DPNot the data], but the analysis worries me, not is merged at the edge of the nominal phrase, while in I wanted that [PP not on the floor], but in the washing basket, not is merged at the edge of the PP.Anaphoric negators -which we have been referring to as propositional no here -are assumed to be merged at the edge of the domain over which they scope, i.e. over the proposition, and thus, taking (14) into account, over either TP or CP.Laka (1994) proposes that this option -which centres on the clausal location of Pol(arity)P -is subject to parametric variation, i.e. that it is another aspect of negative structure that is subject to language-specific considerations.For the purposes of simplicity, we will assume here that propositional no is merged above CP.
What about presuppositional no, however?On the basis of ( 14), our expectation would be that this no would merge in a different location to propositional no as it scopes over a different domain: where propositional no scopes over the proposition expressed by the clause, presuppositional no, which is, crucially, hearer-directed, scopes over the perspectival domain.As such, we propose that presuppositional no is consistently merged higher than propositional no, at the edge of SHP.This is illustrated in vastly simplified form in (15):11  The question that we must address next is how the formal proposal outlined in this section impinges on the competence-performance question raised at the end of the previous section.
That is, granting the validity of the formal structure presented here, why could we not simply say that SAE speakers make use of the higher-merged presuppositional no more frequently, and with fewer concerns about discourse-licensing conditions, than English English speakers?This is the matter to which we now turn.

4.
Ja-nee, it's more than just use: some initial conceptual and empirical arguments Our objective in this section is not to provide an exhaustive argument in favour of the relevance of formal grammatical considerations to our understanding of SAE no -and, we will see, related items; instead, it is to offer a first selection of arguments that point to the conclusion that SAE no and related phenomena probably deserved systematic investigation by syntacticians of a kind they have not previously enjoyed.
Our first argument against the only-use analysis draws on our understanding of the formal consequences of frequent usage.Unquestionably the most famous example in this domain is Jespersen's Cycle (Jespersen 1917; see van der Auwera 2010, and Willis, Lucas and Breitbarth 2013 for overview discussion).In terms of this cycle, negation in particular undergoes a cyclic grammatical change as a consequence of frequency-of-use considerations (see van Gelderen 2011 for discussion of similar cycles in domains beyond negation).More specifically, frequent use of elements that may initially just have served an emphatic reinforcing function -like, historically, forms like pas ("step") in earlier French and nought in earlier English -can lead to this reinforcing function being bleached, which may then lead to that element being endowed with grammatical properties that it did not originally have.Thussimplifying grossly for the purposes of exposition -pas and nought in earlier French and English were nouns, which were ultimately, as a consequence of a generation of acquirers no longer perceiving their use as emphatic, reanalysed as interpretively bleached elements associated with the expression of negation.In both cases, these elements ultimately evolved into the core sentential negation markers in the languages in question, replacing their earlier ne-forms.12What we learn from this well-known phenomenon is that frequent use, particularly where it occurs in tandem with a loosening of semantic or other discourse constraints on its use, can have a direct impact on formal representations, i.e. on grammar.
Particularly also since section 3 has demonstrated that both propositional and anaphoric no are elements associated with particular grammatical domains, this known fact should motivate us to investigate the nature of SAE no -and similar phenomena -in more detail.
Our second argument appeals to the specific contact situation in which SAE is spoken.In particular, we will consider here the fact that SAE has been in longstanding contact with Afrikaans, and also, albeit until the later 1990s in a mostly less intensive way, with a range of Bantu languages (isiXhosa, isiZulu, siSwati, isiNdebele, Sesotho, Setswana, Sepedi, Tshivenda, and Xitsonga).Both contacts will be argued to be significant in that they expose SAE speakers to systems in which "high" hearer-oriented YES-and NO-elements13 play a prominent role.Let us start with Afrikaans, on the grounds that the longer period of intense contact might be expected to produce deeply engrained formal effects.
Afrikaans's contact status is important as it is known to be a language in which an initially hearer-oriented element -nee ("no") or ne ("right") -became grammaticalised as part of the core sentential negation system (see i.a.Roberge 2000, Biberauer 2009, 2015).( 16 Here we see that ja-nee can serve as an enthusiastic marker of agreement with the speaker (18a), a marker of unenthusiastic agreement (18b), a speaker-centric "I-told-you-so" marker (18c), a hearer-oriented empathy marker (18d), a speaker-centred resigned affirmation marker (19), and as part of a simultaneously speaker-coloured and hearer-oriented directive (20).This range of uses, which seems to us to represent only the tip of the iceberg as far as the uses of ja-nee is concerned, shares one key feature: all of the uses crucially express a perspectival meaning of some sort.In terms of the structure in ( 14), then, this evidently non-compositional combination of ja and nee rather clearly belongs within the perspective domain, SHP.
Importantly, ja-nee always seems to signify a qualified "yes" of some kind.As such, it is very different to a YES/NO amalgam found in colloquial German, namely jein.16Consider ( 21 Jein, er war so langweilig, dass ich eingeschlafen bin.Y-N he was so boring that I in.slept was "Yes and no/Sor of, it was so boring that I fell asleep." As the translations show, colloquial German jein is a much more transparent lexical item than colloquial Afrikaans ja-nee: despite their reduced forms, both component parts contribute their meaning to the amalgam, whereas the Afrikaans form, with its unreduced parts, is, as noted above, not compositional.In fact, the meaning of ja-nee is in some respects closer to that of colloquial German naja.Compare ( 22 Naja, ich habe schon bessere gesehen.now-yes I have already better seen "Yes well, I've seen better ones." That ja-nee should be more similar to naja than to jein is significant in the context of our discussion of bleaching at the start of this section: ja-nee is evidently an interpretively bleached element, consisting of components that do not contribute their independent semantics, while jein is not (neither is naja, a compositional element which consists of colloquial German's discourse-particle "now" combined with "yes"; the fact that ja-nee is interpretively like a discourse-particle-containing form is important, as we will see directly, though.).Interestingly, jein also seems to be propositionally oriented, while ja-nee and naja are clearly speaker-hearer-oriented; that is, jein seems to be structurally lower than ja-nee and naja, within the domain that we would usually associate with propositional negation and affirmation (cf.( 14)).In the context of generative approaches to grammaticalisation which view grammaticalisation as a process of upwards reanalysis (cf.Roberts and Roussou 2003), it is, at first sight, tempting to say that ja-nee and naja are more grammaticalised elements than jein: the YES-and NO-components of these forms can no longer be merged within the CP-domain as they have grammaticalised into elements that need to be first-merged within the higher SHP-domain.Taking into account that these particles have taken on new speakerhearer meaning, though, one might instead want to appeal to pragmaticalisation (Diewald 2012): Biberauer (2017b) suggests that pragmaticalisation can involve semantic bleaching of a lexical element that, in this bleached -or underspecified -form, then becomes available for merger not only in its original domain(s), but also at the edge of one or more perspectival domains (see note 10).The thinking here is that a semantically bleached element is, in effect, "less fussy" about the domains in which it can be merged, meaning that its merge options become less restricted; underspecified forms seem to be common feature at the edge phasal domains (cf.Biberauer 2017a, and see again note 10).Regardless of the kind of formal analysis one might wish to pursue, however, it is evident that ja-nee instantiates a salient YES/NO-containing speaker-hearer-oriented left-peripheral form in colloquial Afrikaans, and that it is a form that has undergone the kind of bleaching that we typically see where lexical items become incorporated into the grammatical system.
Additionally, colloquial Afrikaans also features ja wat ("yes what") and nee wat ("no what"), which, again, constitute perspectivally marked YES/NO-forms.In both cases, the presence of wat signals attenuation.In all of the examples in (18) above, for example, wat could replace nee, and the result would be diminished speaker commitment and/or enthusiasm.Further, nee is completely unmarked in the contexts that initially started our discussion in this paper.Consider the Afrikaans counterparts of (1), and (5-6): (22) A: Hoe gaan dit?Without detailed diachronic research, we cannot be sure whether Afrikaans nee influenced SAE no or vice versa; what we can already conclude, based on the facts at our disposal here, though, is that colloquial Afrikaans is a system which features multiple YES/NO-containing lexical items with an unambiguous speaker-hearer orientation.In other words, this appears to be a system in relation to which one can meaningfully refer to a class of speaker-hearerrelated YES/NO-elements which an acquirer might be expected to identify as such.This is significant against the backdrop of a grammar in which clause structure includes a specially designated perspectival domain, as in ( 14).
Importantly, ja-nee -and likewise ja, to which we return below -has been borrowed into SAE.Consider the following:17 (25) a. Ja-nee, I'm fine, thanks.b.
Ja-nee, that's just annoying!(26) a. Ja-no, I mean I understand where you're coming from, but I think you need to put yourself in his shoes.b.
Ja-no, I think she's being completely unreasonable.
The data in ( 26) are particularly interesting in light of our observations about the noncompositionality of Afrikaans ja-nee above.The fact that the nee-component has been independently translated into its English counterpart suggests a more compositional use, in which no contributes negative semantics to the resulting structure, and this seems correct: in (26a), the speaker is leading into an alternative perspective (but I think you need to ...), and in (26b), no seems to serve the presuppositional, hearer-oriented use also observed in the structures that initiated our discussion ((1) and (5-6)), i.e.No, don't worry, I also think she's being completely unreasonable.In both cases, then, negative meaning is activated in a way that it does not seem to be in Afrikaans ja-nee (see again the discussion surrounding (18-20) above).Similarly, the meaning that ja contributes is part discourse-continuative -indicating that the speaker is continuing with the line of discussion/argument articulated in the previous contribution -and part speaker-hearer-oriented, i.e. it also does not contribute the meaning of a "low" YES.Ja-no, then, appears to be a compositional element combining a "high" YES and no (an element very similar to colloquial German naja, thus).This is important as it means that, SAE ja-no, despite its superficial similarities to ja-nee, exhibits a perspectival profile that distinguishes it from ja-nee.And the same may be true for the borrowed ja-nee form: empirical investigation is required to establish whether the full range of Afrikaans janee uses is also available in SAE.Regardless of the outcome of these investigations, however, it is clear that SAE has, as a result of its contact with Afrikaans, added to its lexical inventory a salient speaker-hearer-oriented YES/NO-form, i.e. a new form associated with SHP.
Afrikaans ja has also been independently borrowed into SAE.Again, it is not clear at this point precisely how ja and yes distribute in SAE grammars, but there are certain indications that more in-depth study of this matter may prove rewarding.To give just one example, ja is possible in the English countepart of the naja-structures in (22) above: (27) A: How did you enjoy the movie?B: Ja/??Yes, it was quite good.
As discussed above, these structures feature a "high" yes-element, which suggests that ja in SAE may differ from yes in being able to realise this higher position.This impression is reinforced by its ready combinability with another Afrikaans-derived hearer-oriented form that is often cited as a characteristic of SAE: quasi-vocative man, as in Ja, man, it was quite good or Ja, man, I've seen better, both of which can be addressed to one or more men, women or children.It is known that yeah has a range of functions that go beyond that of yesincluding, tellingly, both discourse-regulation and more generally speaker-hearer-related ones (cf.i.a.Drummond and Hopper 1993), and this also seems to be true for ja -a topic well worth investigating in more detail.
Also worthy of closer investigation is the more general fact that modern-day SAE features a strikingly large and varied lexical inventory of yes-and no-items.isiZulu-derived yebo and its emphatic counterpart YEEEBO!, and additionally aweh, yas(s), yip, and yeah, among others, are all cases of the former, while isiXhosa-derived emphatic (h)aikhona (literally: hayi + khona = "no+here", or a clear-and-present no), and nei are two examples of the latter.In some cases, it is immediately clear that we are dealing with "high" yes/no-element.Consider, for example, isiZulu yebo, which is also a greeting form, as demonstrated in the now-iconic Yebo gogo! ("Hello, grandmother!") of South Africa's Vodacom advertisements. 18Tellingly, yebo can combine with yes, giving yebo yes!, a reinforced version of yebo, which therefore calls to mind the Jespersenian cycle depicted in (16).To the extent that SAE speakers -and here it is worth emphasising that there are, in fact, different varieties of SAE (cf.i.a.Mesthrie 2002)employ a range of YES-and NO-forms alongside one another, we would, in light of the putatively human preference to avoid true synonymy, expect these forms not to have unduly overlapping distributions.Co-occurrence phenomena such as that illustrated by ja-nee, ja-no, yebo yes, and also (h)aikona no, yes-ja, and other attested forms that we have not been able to discuss here clearly require the postulation of a formal distinction between the combined items: formally identical items are standardly assumed to "compete" for the same structural position and, as such, they cannot co-occur.Given the structural template in ( 14), it is clear that there is "space" for (a range of) clearly distinct propositionand speaker-hearer-oriented YES/NO-forms, and it would seem that SAE acquirers receive significant input explicitly signalling the fact that the contact-influenced system they are acquiring is one in which both types of YES/NO-items occur.
Before concluding, let us consider the second major contact factor mentioned above: the Bantu languages spoken in South Africa.No. B': Yes.
In truth-or agree/disagree-based systems, the answer to this question will be that given by B' above: YES -in other words, Yes, it is true: John does not drink coffee., or Yes, I agree with you that John does not drink coffee.As will be clear from the latter answer in particular, this YES is a speaker-hearer-oriented YES: Yes, I agree with you, the speaker/now my hearer, that John does not drink coffee.In the context of the clause structure sketched in ( 14), then, we would expect response particles in truth-based systems to be structurally high, crucially located within the perspectival domain, SHP.As we will see shortly, there seems to be further evidence to support this analytical proposal. 18As pointed out by Andrew van der Spuy, this yes-greeting syncretism in isiZulu may well be the source of the yes-greeting that seems to have arisen in general colloquial SAE and also colloquial Afrikaans during the past few decades.Consider (i) and (ii) in this connection: (i) Yes! Howzit?
(ii) Yes! Hoe gaan dit? yes how go it "Yes/Hello!How are you?" First, though, let us also consider B's answer in (28).NO is the answer that we would expect in standard English and also in standard Afrikaans: No, John does not drink coffee.This is the so-called positive/negative-or polarity-based system because the answer picks up on the polarity (positive or negative) of the original question.Since answers in this system are specifically oriented to the polarity of the proposition, we might expect the response particles in these systems to be located in a position where they scope directly over the proposition, i.e. at the edge of the Discourse domain or CP.In other words, YES and NO in these systems are, by hypothesis, merged in a structurally lower position than the corresponding elements in Bantu languages.( 29 Recalling the discussion in section 3, where we analysed presuppositional no as an SHPassociated element which contrasts with CP-associated propositional no -cf.( 15) -we see that the "regular" YES/NO particles in truth-based systems would seem to be merged in the same domain as the "special" hearer-oriented presuppositional particles in SAE and English more generally (cf. in this connection, our discussion of isiZulu yebo, where there is independent motivation for postulating a "high" merge position).As such, we might expect L2 difficulties where native-speakers of Bantu languages -or other truth-based systemsacquire English.That is, we might expect these L2 learners not to pick up on the fact that the "regular" yes/no in English is, in fact, a CP-related element and thus not formally identical to the (apparent) translation equivalent in their L1.In this case, the would analyse "regular"/nonpresuppositional English yes as a (29a)-type SHP-element rather than as the (29b)-type CPelement.
And this expectation is indeed borne out.Thus Mesthrie and Bhatt (2008: 86-89) note that Black South African English (BSAE) speakers respond with the "wrong" response particle when confronted with negative questions.(30) illustrates: (30) Q: Isn't he arriving tomorrow?A: No. (meaning "Yes, he is arriving tomorrow.") Here the response is equivalent to No, it is not true/I don't agree with you that he isn't arriving tomorrow, i.e. he is arriving tomorrow.As Mesthrie and Bhatt (2008: 87) note, this "wrong" answering pattern also surfaces in other African and Asian L2 Englishes.As the relevant parts of Africa and Asia are dominated by truth-based answering systems (see Holmberg 2016: chapter 4 for discussion), it is tempting to diagnose structural interference from the L1 in all of these cases.In other words, it is tempting to suggest that response particles in the relevant L2 Englishes are located in the higher perspectival zone, rather than in the standard English CP-domain.This then creates a favourable context for the standard English presuppositional no -an SHP-element -to conflate with the L2 English no, which, like no in truth-based systems more generally, always takes the previous speaker as its point of departure.
In certain varieties of SAE, then -Black varieties -yes and no may always be structurally higher than their regular standard English counterparts, proposition-or polarity-oriented yes and no.For speakers of these varieties, "over-use" of no in structures like those which kicked off our discussion in this paper is very clearly more than a matter of use; there is, additionally, a specifiable difference at the level of grammatical structure.For L1 SAE speakers, by contrast, it does not seem correct to say that yes and no have simply become reanalysed as "high" SHP-elements.To the best of our knowledge, these speakers respond to negative yesno questions in the same way as standard English speakers elsewhere, which means that they must be able to merge yes and no within the CP-domain in these contexts at least: polaritybased answering systems, like standard English, have "low" response particles.Since yes/noquestions are high-frequency structures in child-directed input -at least for languages spoken in familiar Western cultures -we might expect this "low" yes and no to be acquired early.What our discussion in this section has shown, however, is that SAE acquirers will also encounter a diverse range of further YES/NO-elements, which are rather clearly not associated with the CP-domain, but instead with the perspectival SHP-domain.The cue that yes and no can merge in two different domains is therefore particularly clear in the SAE input.Furthermore, the densely populated nature of the class of perspectival YES/NO-elements might lead one to expect certain interpretive developments, including (i) the development, over time, of non-overlapping uses, and (ii) as a result of the overall frequency with which these elements, as a class, are employed, the bleaching of some of the conditions that would ordinarily have held of the use of individual members.This second consideration, we argue, underlies the availability of SAE presuppositional no in structures like (1) and (5-6).That is, we propose that SAE's peculiar no owes its bleached "concern" requirement -creating the impression that SAE speakers are, almost by default, keen to "reassure" their interlocutor -to the fact that it is part of a class of high-frequency perspectival elements, many of which have, as a result of the frequency with which they are used, undergone bleaching relative to their original meanings and contexts of usage.Of the elements we have been able to discuss here, ja-nee and ja-no, for example, seem to instantiate this bleaching rather clearly.Our prediction, though, is that this pattern will emerge even more clearly as a general pattern if further perspectival forms, yes/no-based and otherwise, are taken into account.

Conclusion
Our discussion began with a single unusual no-form employed by SAE speakers.As has hopefully become clear during the course of our discussion, however, SAE and other languages spoken in South Africa have a rich and diverse inventory of YES-and NOelements, many of which exhibit, both in isolation and in combination, properties that we might not initially associate with affirmation and negation elements.In particular, we observe that YES and NO in languages spoken in South Africa appear to be intimately and, crucially, distinctively associated with discourse and, particularly, perspectival functions of the kind that modern-day generativists associate with particular clausal domains.As such, these elements are already worth detailed study, something that they have not received to date.
Further reason to investigate these elements and their interrelations carefully is that they evidently make a very significant contribution to the natural, idiomatic use of the languages concerned: SAE employed without the elements discussed here, and without the wider inventory of perspectival elements of which they are a part, would lose much of its distinctive character.And the same is true for colloquial Afrikaans and, we suggest, for colloquial varieties more generally: in such systems, perspectival elements arguably take on greater significance than they do in less fundamentally interaction-oriented systems, leading to the rich speaker-hearer-oriented lexical inventories and (in part, associated) grammatical conventions that we observe in colloquial varieties.Importantly, the elements that serve speaker-hearer-oriented functions are typically drawn from (i) elements already in the system, which undergo reanalysis (pragmaticalisation), or (ii) elements borrowed from other systems with which it is in contact.Because of (ii), contact varieties are predicted to vary considerably in respect of the way in which speakers "do" perspective and hearer-management more generally.This seems correct if we consider the striking differences between contact Englishes in this domain (see i.a.Mesthrie and Bhatt 2008 for discussion and references, and note also that languages appear to vary as to the extent to which they employ just or predominantly the outermost clausal periphery -SHP in ( 14) -or just or predominantly the inner clausal periphery -see note 10 -or some combination of the two).The cross-varietal variation introduced by (ii), however, necessarily also has consequences for the way in which (i) contributes to the encoding of speaker-hearer-oriented meanings.
Owing to our limited objectives in this paper, we have not been able to go into detail about the precise articulation of the perspectival domain depicted in ( 14), or of that which we assume to be present at other phase edges (see note 10).The full grammatical significance of the elements and patterns that we have highlighted here, and the very clear sense in which these regularities are truly grammatical, must therefore await future research.In the interim, the sceptical reader is, like readers more generally and the recipient of this festschrift in particular, invited to consider the output of Wiltschko's eh-lab (see note 8), and to follow up on other studies referenced in this work.
Hast du schon den neuen Film gesehen?have you already the new movie seen "Have you already seen the new movie?"B: Jein, ich habe bis jetzt nur den Trailer gesehen.Y-N I have till now only the trailer seen "Yes and no/Sort of, I've only seen the trailer so far."B': To the best of our knowledge, all of these languages employ what has in the literature been called a truth-based or agree/disagree-based system of answering negative questions (see Holmberg 2016 for discussion and references).To see what what this means, consider (28), which is adapted from Holmberg (2016: 4):