Table Of Contentedited by
Stephen Matthews
Published in 1998 by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong
G.P.O. Box 9772, Hong Kong
ISBN 962-7578-04-5
"Hong Kong Cantonese Tone Contours" ©Robert S.Bauer
"On the 'inverted' double object construction" © Sze-Wing Tang
"Postverbal KEOI as a marker for nonasserted bounded clauses" ©Patricia Yuk-Hing Man
"Possessive constructions, classifiers and specificity in Cantonese" © Patrizia Pacioni
"Auxiliary Verbs in Cantonese" © Owen Nancarrow & Kang-Kwong Luke
"The Expression of Futurity in English and Cantonese Verbs" © Kang-Kwong Luke &
Owen Nancarrow
"First auxiliaries and modality in child Cantonese" © Colleen Wong
"Expanding the scope of the sentence-final position: postposed modals in Cantonese"
© Dana S. Bourge rie
Preface vi
Stephen Matthews
1. Hong Kong Cantonese Tone Contours 1
Robert S.Bauer
2. On the 'inverted' double object construction 35
Sze-Wing Tang
3. Postverbal KEOI as a marker for nonasserted bounded clauses 53
Patricia Yuk-Hing Man
4. Possessive constructions, classifiers and specificity in Cantonese 63
Patrizia Pacioni
5. Auxiliary Verbs in Cantonese 85
Owen Nancarrow & Kang-Kwong Luke
6. The Expression of Futurity in English and Cantonese Verbs 101
Kang-Kwong Luke & Owen Nancarrow
7. First auxiliaries and modality in child Cantonese 113
Colleen Wong
8. Expanding the scope of the sentence-final position: 133
postposed modals in Cantonese
Dana S. Bourgerie
Notes on contributors 147
Acknowledgements
The publication of this book is funded in part by a grant from the Freemasons' Fund for
East Asian Studies
Preface
Wa ! Cantonese jau5 grammar ge3 mel?
'What, you mean Cantonese has grammar?' (A Hong Kong undergraduate)
The student's response to a question on Cantonese grammar-- by no means unusual
-- illustrates the widespread preconception that Cantonese has no grammar to call its own.
Speakers of Cantonese tend to believe that only written Chinese, or Mandarin, has
grammar, while Cantonese is distinguished from Chinese only by pronunciation, idiom and
usage. Even among linguists the view persists that the Chinese 'dialects', while differing
widely in phonology, somehow share the same grammatical structure. Reflecting the
prevailing view, the field of Chinese linguistics has so far been based to a large extent on
Mandarin data. In recent years, however, research has begun to consider Chinese grammar
in a comparative perspective. It has become clear that differences in structure between
Chinese dialects (or Sinitic languages) have often been underestimated, and that Cantonese
is especially distinctive in this respect. At the same time, Cantonese language and culture
have gained in prestige, helping to make their study attractive to scholars and students.
The Linguistic Society of Hong Kong has played a significant role in this resurgence
of interest, beginning with the first International Conference on Cantonese and other Yue
Dialects co-sponsored by the Society in 1987. Most of the papers collected here have their
origin in LSHK events, such as the Annual Research Forum and the syntax and semantics
workshop held in 1994; others have been written and presented elsewhere by overseas
members of the Society who have worked in Hong Kong at some time in their careers. We
hope that these papers will demonstrate the rich wealth of grammatical structure in
Cantonese, much of which still awaits detailed exploration. Reflecting this situation, the
papers presented here are primarily descriptive in orientation; we look forward to the
appearance of more theoretically oriented work on Cantonese in the near future.
Some of the papers address established distinctive features of Cantonese grammar,
such as the double objeq construction analysed by Tang Sze-Wing and the syntax of
classifiers whose role in possessive constructions is described by Patrizia Pacioni. Another
highly distinctive feature is the postverbal usage of the pronoun keoi discussed by Patricia
Man. Robert Bauer's contribution brings experimental data to bear on the complex phonetic
reality behind the familiar tonal categories. The papers by K.K.Luke and Owen Nancarrow
focus on the syntax and semantics of modal auxiliaries, making use of corpus data. The
syntax of modals is also a concern of Dana Bourgerie's paper on the 'afterthought'
construction, a feature of colloquial speech rarely noted in grammatical descriptions.
A further development during the 1990s in which LSHK members have been
actively involved has been the investigation of the acquisition of Cantonese as a first
language. The fruits of the Cancorp child language corpus project are represented here by
Colleen Wong's contribution on the development of modality in child Cantonese. This line
of work promises to enrich the data base for the field of child language acquisition, which
has been dominated by findings from English and other European languages.
The present volume adopts the LSHK romanization system, JyutPing (a truncation
of Jyut6jyu5 Ping4jaml, 'Cantonese pinyin', coined by Caesar Lun). The lack of a
standard system of romanization has long hampered research and teaching involving
linguistic analysis of Cantonese -- an issue brought to the society's attention by Cheung
Kwan Hin at the LSHK's 1991 Symposium on the Teaching of Linguistics in Chinese
Communities. This problem, and the possible solutions to it, were discussed at a workshop
held at the City Polyteclmic of Hong Kong in 1992. Subsequently a working party chaired
by Dr. Cheung set out to devise a scheme which would serve a variety of functions. As well
as teaching and research, the system needed to be practical for computer applications, thus
ruling out the popular Yale system which requires diacritics not available on the standard
keyboard or as ASCII characters. The new system was adopted by LSHK and first
presented at the 4th International Conference on Cantonese and other Yue Dialects in
December 1993. A JyutPing handbook and glossary was published by the Society in 1997.
JyutPing has proved to be a flexible and versatile system: for example, users are at liberty
to use or omit tone markings according to the purposes for which it is used. We hope that
this book will contribute to the promotion of JyutPing and greater standardization of usage
which will facilitate research on Cantonese.
We would like to thank our reviewers for their thorough critical commentaries on
the contributions, and the audiences, both within and outside the whose feedback
has contributed to the development of these papers. We are also grateful for the support
which the Society's publication programme has received from the Freemason's Fund for
East Asian Studies.
Stephen Matthews
University of Hong Kong
Hong Kong Cantonese Tone Contours
Robe1t S. Bauer
Dept. of Chinese aud Bilingual Studies
Hong Kong Polytechnic University
1.1 Introduction.: Standard Cantonese ton.e categories
Among the southern Chinese dialect faurilies Yue is noted for having a
large number of tones. The devoicing of voiced obstment initials during the
Ancient Chinese period neatly split the Cautonese tone system into upper
(Yin) aud lower (Ya ug) registers which thus still presetve the Ancient
Chinese distinction. Phonetic descriptions of staudard Cautonese have
typically recognized nine tone categories but only six or seven basic tones:
the High, Mid, aud Mid-Low tones on morphosyllables ending in the stop
consonants -p, -"' -k have usually been treated as more or less similar to
the High, Mid, aud Mid-Low level tones that occur on open
morphosyllables aud morphosyllables closed by the nasal consonants -m,
-n, -1] (c£ Cheung Y-s. 1969:82, 106; Yuau 1983:181; Zeng 1986:xiii;
Zee 1991:48). Whether the system comprises six or seven tones depends on
whether or not the speaker uses only the High Level tone or both the High
Level aud High Falling tones. Table 1 below presents the Cautonese tone
categories with their traditional English aud Chinese names aud numbers
aud the tone contours as represented by Chao tone letters aud illuStrated by
lexical examples with their English glosses. The tone values assigned to the
contours are those given by Chao (1947:24) for the Guaugzhou variety.
f. 1:.
A.
T.a ble I C au t· onese t one cat egones.
Ping-sheng Shang-sheng ~-s•he ng Ru-sheng
Level I Rising II Going m Entering IV
Yin Upper Yin-ping Upper Yin-m
~ ;&.ji: 155 ~jf: ~35 f1J: ji: 133 ~ jeK: 15
'clothes' 1a 'chair' 'idea' 'profit' 7a
............... ...........
Lower Yin-ping Lower Yin-m
fJifi: ~53 Hll!:Ji:p -l33
'cure' 1b 3 5 'to pickle' 7b
Yaug = ~jl:p ~22
Mi ~ jt: .J21 J+jf: ~23 ji: ~22 'leaf'
'suspicious' 'ear' 'two' ~ ji:t ~22
'hot'
ztF.#k
~22
2 4 6 'also' 8
1.2 Hong Kong and Guangzhou tone contour systems
An implicit assumption underlying descriptions of Cantonese tones is that
the Guangzhou tone contour system is identical to the Hong Kong system.
While this is generally true, the two systems differ in at least one respect,
i.e., how Guangzhou and Hong Kong speakers use the two contours of
High Level 155 and High Falling ~53 which have split the Yin-ping
category into Upper and Lower divisions. Zeng (1986:xiii) has observed
that "Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong prefers High Level. High Falling is
usually heard in Guangdong Cantonese". While Zeng's statement is
certainly true as far as it goes, in fact High Falling and High Level occur in
both varieties. However, variation in the social distribution as well as in the
functional relationship of the two tones now distinguishes the two speech
communities. As a result, the status and description of the two tones have
differed among Cantonese linguists as Lin (1994:87) has noted in his
literature review.
1.3 Relationship of High Level and High Falling tones in Guangzhou
The lexical distribution of the High Level and High Falling tone contours
in standard Cantonese has been conditioned by two factors. The first is
tonal environment with the High Falling tone contour assimilating to High
Level when it occurs before another High Falling or High Level tone (Chao
1947:26). The second factor is word-class membership as established by
Zong ( 1964) in his very comprehensive investigation into the relationship of
these two tones. High Level generally occurs on concrete nouns as a so
called pi:n-jum ~if 'changed tone' discussed further below; High Falling,
which is usually considered to be the basic tone, occurs on abstract nouns
and other word classes, such as verbs, stative verbs, classifiers, etc. Tonal
assimilation and derivation through tone change are two different linguistic
processes which both yield the High Level tone contour.
In the course of my acoustic study of the Cantonese tones I have worked
with two Guangzhou speakers for whom the High Falling tone contour
which has a long, steep fall (I would describe it as ~51 or ~52) stands in
sharp, unmistakable contrast to the High Level tone contour. In a recording
session with one of my Guangzhou subjects, a retired professor of
Cantonese linguistics who was consciously aware of the difference in the
lexical distribution of the two tone contours, she precisely contrasted them
and drew my attention to how and why they were different. The other
Guangzhou speaker, a male postgraduate student in physics about 35 years
of age, knew nothing of linguistics, yet he also distinguished between the
High Falling and High Level tones in a generally systematic fashion.
Working with just two speakers obviously has its limitations, yet I believe
2
my observations generally concur the traditional of this
tone. subsequent analysis of recordings made -with two speakers,
one aged 43 from Guangzhou and the other aged 49 from Hong (the
was born in China but grew up in :liom about age 3)
has produced similar findings for both these high tones.
1.4 Level and
in is an interesting
sociolinguistic question but we still lack a detailed answer. up on
Zong's analysis, Y-s. Cheung (1969) claimed that the same distinction
between and Level described for generally
applied to as well. His article made no statement about
the speaker(s) he had consulted, and one assumes that he based his research
on his own speech. In a recent commtmication (May 1996) he
stated that he distinguishes between Level and tones. In
his 1972 grammar ofHong Cantonese H-n. (1972:6) stated
that the Level and tones had already become two
maep(~no.enr tone categories. He described in some detail fi"om Y -s.
Cheung's and his acceptance of them suggests that he must have
made the same tonal contrasts in his own speech. In in
1996 the author recorded H-n. Cheung with the WINCECIL program
(described below) and found that he does indeed contrast the Level
and tones. 'TI1e group of Fok worked with in her
1974 acoustic study on Cantonese tones had both Level
and tone contours. For her Figures 4, 16, 19, and 20
150, 153, 154, respectively) include sharply falling tone
contours (to which I would assign the Chao tone letter value ~51 or ~52)
for both male and female speakers, and one of her female subjects
rep,re1;ented by Figure 15 149) had a relatively level Yin-ping tone
contour of 155. Both Lau (1977) and Kwan (1990) systematically
distinguished the two tones in their Kong
dictionaries. at some point in time the
losing favor among some Kong speakers with Level replacing
it. Zee (1991:48) in his phonetic sketch of Hong Kong Cantonese listed
High Level as the basic lexical tone and referred to the Falling as its
variant which only occurs on certain utterance-final particles.
My own acoustic work on Kong Cantonese has been with six
speakers who were bom and raised in Kong, and none of them
distinguish between the High Falling and Level tone contours. Four
speakers seem to have only High Level, while two speakers have both
Falling and High Level. One of these speakers may use Falling before
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