|
Showing 1 - 3 of
3 matches in All Departments
One prominent function of natural language is to convey
information. One peculiarity is that it does not do so randomly,
but in a structured way, with information structuring formally
recognized to be a component of grammar. Among all information
structuring notions, focus is one primitive needed to account for
all phenomena. Focus Manifestation in Mandarin Chinese and
Cantonese: A Comparative Perspective aims to examine from a
semantic perspective how syntactic structures and focus adverbs in
Mandarin Chinese and semantic particles in Cantonese conspire to
encode focus structures and determine focus manifestation in
Chinese. With both being tonal languages, Mandarin Chinese and
Cantonese manifest different morpho-syntactic configurations to
mark focus. A general principle governing focus marking in Mandarin
Chinese and Cantonese is given in the book, which aims to give a
better understanding of the underlying principles the two use to
mark additive and restrictive meanings, and related focus
interpretations. Particular attention is also drawn to the
co-occurrence of multiple forms of restrictive and additive
particles in Cantonese, including adverbs, verbal suffixes and
sentence-final particles. Linearity has been shown to be an
important parameter to determine how focus is structured in
Cantonese. This book is aimed at advanced graduate students,
researchers, and scholars working on Chinese linguistics, syntax
and semantics, and comparative dialectal grammar.
One prominent function of natural language is to convey
information. One peculiarity is that it does not do so randomly,
but in a structured way, with information structuring formally
recognized to be a component of grammar. Among all information
structuring notions, focus is one primitive needed to account for
all phenomena. Focus Manifestation in Mandarin Chinese and
Cantonese: A Comparative Perspective aims to examine from a
semantic perspective how syntactic structures and focus adverbs in
Mandarin Chinese and semantic particles in Cantonese conspire to
encode focus structures and determine focus manifestation in
Chinese. With both being tonal languages, Mandarin Chinese and
Cantonese manifest different morpho-syntactic configurations to
mark focus. A general principle governing focus marking in Mandarin
Chinese and Cantonese is given in the book, which aims to give a
better understanding of the underlying principles the two use to
mark additive and restrictive meanings, and related focus
interpretations. Particular attention is also drawn to the
co-occurrence of multiple forms of restrictive and additive
particles in Cantonese, including adverbs, verbal suffixes and
sentence-final particles. Linearity has been shown to be an
important parameter to determine how focus is structured in
Cantonese. This book is aimed at advanced graduate students,
researchers, and scholars working on Chinese linguistics, syntax
and semantics, and comparative dialectal grammar.
Cantonese, the lingua franca 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, -saai, -hoi and
-maai. 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. 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.
|
You may like...
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
|