Intermediate Cantonese: A Grammar and Workbook (Grammar Workbooks)

212 Pages·2017·1.818 MB·English

by  Virginia Yip, Stephen Matthews

INTERMEDIATE CANTONESE

The second edition of Intermediate Cantonese is designed for learners who have
achieved basic profi ciency and wish to progress to more complex language.
Each of the 25 units combines clear, concise grammar explanations with
communicatively oriented exercises to help build confi dence and fl uency.
Features include:
• many authentic examples from contemporary media, including fi lms,
advertising, songs and soap operas
• clear differentiation between colloquial and more formal speech registers
• up-to-date analysis of contemporary Cantonese as spoken in Hong Kong.
Suitable for independent learners and students on taught courses, Intermediate
Cantonese, together with its sister volume, Basic Cantonese, forms a structured
course of the essentials of Cantonese grammar.
Virginia Yip is Professor at the Department of Linguistics and Modern
Languages, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is Co-Director of
the University of Cambridge-CUHK Joint Laboratory for Bilingualism and
Director of the CUHK-Peking University-University System of Taiwan Joint
Research Centre for Language and Human Complexity.
Stephen Matthews is Professor at the Department of Linguistics at the
University of Hong Kong. They are the authors of Basic Cantonese: A
Grammar and Workbook (2000), Cantonese: A Comprehensive Grammar
(1994, 2nd edition 2011), The Bilingual Child: Early Development and
Language Contact (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and co-directors of the
Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre.
Titles of related interest published by Routledge
Basic Cantonese
A Grammar and Workbook
By Virginia Yip and Stephen Matthews
Cantonese
A Comprehensive Grammar
By Stephen Matthews and Virginia Yip

Colloquial Cantonese
A Complete Language Course
By Keith S. T. Tong and Gregory James
Basic Chinese
A Grammar and Workbook
By Yip Po-Ching and Don Rimmington
Intermediate Chinese
A Grammar and Workbook
By Yip Po-Ching and Don Rimmington
Chinese
An Essential Grammar
By Yip Po-Ching and Don Rimmington
Colloquial Chinese
A Complete Language Course
By Kan Qian
Colloquial Chinese
CD-ROM By Kan Qian
Colloquial Chinese (Reprint of the fi rst edition)
By Ping-Cheng T’ung and David E. Pollard
INTERMEDIATE
CANTONESE: A
GRAMMAR AND

WORKBOOK
Second Edition
Virginia Yip and Stephen Matthews
Second edition published 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2017 Virginia Yip and Stephen Matthews
The right of Virginia Yip and Stephen Matthews to be identifi ed as authors of this work
has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identifi cation and explanation without intent to
infringe.
First edition published by Routledge 2001
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Yip, Virginia, 1962– author. | Matthews, Stephen, 1963– author.
Title: Intermediate Cantonese : a grammar and workbook / Virginia Yip
and Stephen Matthews.
Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, [2017] |
Series: Grammar workbooks | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifi ers: LCCN 2016038441 | ISBN 9780415815604 (hardback) |
ISBN 9780415815611 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781315265223 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Cantonese dialects—Grammar.
Classifi cation: LCC PL1733 .Y565 2017 | DDC 495.17/95127—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016038441
ISBN: 978-0-415-81560-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-415-81561-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-131-526-522-3 (ebk)
Typeset in Times Ten
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
For Alicia Tīn Wihng
in celebration of a new millennium –
Chīn Hēi Lìhn 千禧年

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ix
Introduction x
1 Consonants and vowels 1
2 Tone contours 7
3 Changed tones 12
4 Reduplication 20
5 Word formation 29
6 Verb-object compounds 35
7 Adjectives and stative verbs 41
8 Classifi ers revisited 46
9 Topic and focus 54
10 Using jēung 將 60
11 Serial verbs 65
12 Aspect markers 72
13 Comparisons 81
14 Resultative and causative sentences with dou 到 87
15 Quantifi cation 94
16 Negative sentences 104
17 Questions and answers 110
18 Relative clauses 117
19 Subordinate clauses 124
20 Conditional sentences 131
21 Reported speech 139
22 Cantonese speech conventions 146
23 Particles and interjections 153
vii
Contents 24 Colloquial syntax 161
25 Code-mixing and loanwords 169
Key to exercises 176
Glossary of grammatical terms 195
Index 197

viii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Since the publication of Basic Cantonese and Intermediate Cantonese, we have
been pleased to hear from readers from around the world. We thank them for
their heart-warming feedback and appreciation. Foremost among their sug-
gestions has been the inclusion of Chinese characters, which we are happy to
supply in this revised edition. We hope that our books on Cantonese gram-
mar and its acquisition by bilingual children will contribute to wider efforts in
promoting the language and its culture and providing tools for learners and
teachers of Cantonese.
Thanks are also due to our dear friends and colleagues who have supported
us over the years, and to numerous Cantonese speakers who, whether under
duress or inadvertently, have supplied us with lively and colourful examples.
Special mention must be made of our captive informants in the Yip family:
Peggy, Patrick and Linda, Dan and Kennis. Pride of place goes to our three chil-
dren, Timothy, Sophie and Alicia, whose Cantonese advanced from ‘basic’ level
to beyond the modest level of this book during the writing of the fi rst edition.
For valuable input to the fi rst edition of this book as well as to Basic Can-
tonese, we thank Umberto Ansaldo, whose suggestions as a linguist and learner
of Cantonese led to numerous improvements. The discussion of tongue twisters
and Japanese loanwords with Cream Lee and Shin Kataoka was also a timely
gift. For work on the second edition, we thank our assistants Szeto Pui Yiu and
Cindy Cheung Shu Ting for their careful editing and constructive suggestions.
We thank the reviewers and the Routledge editorial team who have seen the
project through. We naturally take responsibility for any errors which remain.
Finally, we take the opportunity to pay tribute to the many scholars who
have contributed to uncovering the richness of Cantonese grammar. Among
these, we feel particularly indebted to Thomas O’Melia, Y.R. Chao, Samuel
Cheung Hung-Nin and Anne Yue.
ix