Cantonese particles and affixal quantification
<p>Cantonese, the <i>lingua franca</i> of Hong Kong and its neighboring province, has an unusually rich repertoire of verbal particles. This volume significantly augments the academic literature on their semantics, focusing on three affixal quantifiers, -<i>saai</i>, -&...
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| Main Author: | |
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| Corporate Author: | |
| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Dordrecht
Springer Netherlands
2012.
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| Series: | Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory,
87 |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Click here to view the full text content |
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| Summary: | <p>Cantonese, the <i>lingua franca</i> of Hong Kong and its neighboring province, has an unusually rich repertoire of verbal particles. This volume significantly augments the academic literature on their semantics, focusing on three affixal quantifiers, -<i>saai</i>, -<i>hoi</i> and -<i>maai</i>. The author shows how these verbal suffixes display a unique interplay of syntax and semantics: used in a sentence with no focus, they quantify items flexibly, according to an accessibility hierarchy; with focus, focus comes into effect after syntactic selection.</p><p>This fresh and compelling perspective in the study of particles and quantification is the first in-depth analysis of Cantonese verbal suffixes. It compares the language's affixal quantification to the alternative determiner and adverbial quantifiers. The book's syntax-semantics mapping geography deploys both descriptive and theoretical approaches, making it an essential resource for researchers studying the nexus of syntax and semantics, as well as Cantonese itself.</p><p> |
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| Physical Description: | XIII, 253 p. 22 illus. digital. |
| ISBN: | 9789400743878 |
| ISSN: | 0924-4670 |