published_or_final_version / Chinese Language and Literature / Master / Master of Arts

Cantonese, the standard and socially the most prestigious of the Yue dialects, is certainly an important dialect for investigation. Apart from being a regional dialect of the Guangdong province, Hong Kong and Macau, it is also widely used throughout the Chinese communities in the U.S., Canada, Australia and the U.K. In the past seventy years, a number of dictionaries on Cantonese have been compiled. Among them, the Langwen chujie zhongwen cidian 朗文初階中文詞典 and the Zhonghua xin zidian中華新字典 are both widely used and are therefore influential standards on the dialect. Yet, despite their importance, specialist and systematic studies on the Cantonese pronunciations given in them are few and far between. The present dissertation is the first attempt to study the subject. It is found that many Chinese characters are given surprisingly different pronunciations in the two dictionaries. However, the two dictionaries do not state very clearly how they determine the Cantonese pronunciation given in them. This results in great confusion for dictionary users. The present thesis attempts to analyze differences between the two dictionaries with reference to (1) the number of pronunciations given to each character, (2) the order of listing the pronunciations, (3) tone change and (4) the listing of commonly used pronunciations. / published_or_final_version / Chinese Language and Literature / Master / Master of Arts

This study examines the emergence and development of the Cantonese serial verb construction (SVC) in children from 1;03 to 4;06 by investigating the naturalistic data from two longitudinal corpora. This study presents a descriptive account of the emergence and development of SVCs in early child Cantonese, seeks to explain the developmental facts from a constructionist usage-based perspective, and compares the development of SVCs in Cantonese-English bilinguals with that in Cantonese monolinguals. It is found that children start to produce SVCs spontaneously at an early age of 1;10 and that the overall frequency of occurrence is low during the developmental period studied. The early emergence of SVCs is attributed to children’s preference for iconic structures. Four surface forms are identified and shown to emerge with a consistent order: two-verb contiguous (1;10-11) < two-verb non-contiguous (2;00-01) < multi-verb contiguous (2;02) < multi-verb non-contiguous (2;03-06). Structural and conceptual complexities are suggested to be the possible factors that influence the order. The earlier emergence of contiguous forms than non-contiguous forms is explained by the hypothesis that cross-linguistically unmarked structures tend to be acquired earlier than the marked ones (O’Grady 2000). Such a generalization is compatible with constructionist approaches in suggesting cross-linguistic cognitive functional preferences for language processing. Children tend to use certain component verbs that express eight main semantic notions. The study interprets children’s SVCs as concrete instantiations of eight sub-constructions, which are subsumed by a more abstract high level SVC schema. It is observed that sub-constructions develop asynchronously, as the developmental paths of the four more frequently used SVCs (directional, dative, purpose and resultative SVCs) are more advanced than the four less often produced SVCs (instrumental, benefactive, comitative and locative SVCs). Developmental paths of the former are shown to be consistent with Tomasello’s (2003) usage-based account of language development: from concrete expressions, to pivot schemas, then to item-based constructions. However, this study does not have enough data to suggest the emergence of an abstract schema for the high level SVC. It is found that children imitate adults’ previous SVCs and repeat their own spontaneous productions frequently. These highlight the roles of the ambient language and linguistic use to children’s language development. The overall error rates of SVCs are found to be low. The reasons proposed for error production, that are, adult input, generalization from item-based constructions and complexity of target constructions, are considered as evidence to support the constructionist usage-based approach. This study shows that Cantonese-dominant bilinguals resemble Cantonese monolinguals in developing SVCs. Language dominance is invoked to account for the developmental similarities observed. Only a few code-mixed instances are recorded, suggesting limited English influence on Cantonese SVCs. It is argued that SVCs are not a vulnerable domain as they emerge early, and are produced with low error rates, and are not susceptible to English influence. By delineating the patterns of emergence and development of SVCs in child Cantonese and explaining the findings with the constructionist usage-based framework, it is hoped that this study would contribute to our understanding of child language development. / published_or_final_version / Linguistics / Master / Master of Philosophy

Although we see an increasing use of Putonghua in Hong Kong since the 1997 handover, under the government’s language policy encouraging bi-literacy and tri-lingualism, Cantonese still retains its dominant position in the territory, where a continuing concern over “proper” Cantonese pronunciation persists. To join in this discussion, the present thesis compares Cantonese pronunciation contained in a recently published Chinese dictionary, The New Commercial Press Dictionary (Shangwu xin cidian 商務新詞典, appearing in 2010), with that in a classical reference A Chinese Syllabary Pronounced According to the Dialect of Canton (Yueyin yunhui粵音韻彙, first published in 1941). A detailed analysis reveals that among the 5,872 common characters, 1,182 differ in their Cantonese pronunciation. Apart from differences in phonological makeup, the two books also diverge in their treatment of literary versus colloquial, and archaic versus contemporary readings. This is most likely due to their 70-year span and disparate natures – a dictionary versus a syllabary. / published_or_final_version / Chinese Language and Literature / Master / Master of Arts

 The processing of relative clauses has been a subject of recurrent interest in psycholinguistics. While a consistent processing preference for subject relative clauses has been found in English (e.g. Just & Carpenter, 1992; King & Just, 1991; King & Kutas, 1995; Traxler, Morris, & Seely, 2002), studies in Mandarin Chinese have not yielded consistent results in the processing asymmetry between subject and object relative clauses (e.g. Hsiao & Gibson, 2003; Lin, 2006). On the other hand, human cognitive preferences have been found to play a role in parsing (Gibson & Pearlmutter, 1998; Tanenhaus & Trueswell, 1995). This dissertation is interested in relating memory with syntactic structures in the course of syntactic parsing, in the hope that it could resolve the conflicting findings in Chinese. We address this by studying Cantonese relative clauses from a processing and working memory perspective. Two experiments were carried out. Experiment 1 involved a self-paced reading task together with an n-back memory task. We found some evidence, although not very conclusive, that object relative clauses were more difficult to comprehend, as reflected in poor comprehension accuracy and response latency. There was significant memory intervention in reading times, though its role in syntactic processing was not clear. Experiment 2 reported a maze task together with an n-back memory task. A processing disadvantage for object relative clauses was evident from a significantly longer reading time on a whole and in the post-relative clause region. A memory effect was found only at the post-relative clause region, possibly indicating that memory capacity as measure by n-back was not influencing the syntactic processing of relative clauses. This dissertation addresses a heavy task effect between Experiment 1 and 2, and the possible discrepancy between processing performance and production preferences. Processing models emphasizing the role of memory and syntactic structures as well as the “cooperation” of the two models were also discussed. / published_or_final_version / Linguistics / Master / Master of Philosophy

Cantonese is not only a lingua franca in Guangdong province, Hong Kong and Macau but also a dialect that is widely used by overseas Chinese communities around the world. Being the most prestigious Yue dialect, Cantonese is definitely an important dialect that is worth investigating. In the past few decades, over a dozen dictionaries on Cantonese have been compiled. Among them, the Guangzhouhua zhengyin zidian 《廣州話正音字典》and Yueyin zhengdu zihui 《粵音正讀字彙》are both widely used and thus influential standards on Cantonese. Despite their importance, systematic studies on the Cantonese pronunciations given in the two dictionaries are few and far between. The present thesis is the first attempt to study the subject. The present dissertation attempts to analyze the differences between the two dictionaries so that a comprehensive list of their differences can be obtained. The analysis is conducted with reference to the number of pronunciations given to each character; the order of listing the pronunciations; tone change; and the listing of commonly used pronunciations. The present thesis also tries to examine the differences between the two editions of Guangzhouhua zhengyin zidian and among the three editions of Yueyin zhengdu zihui. Possible reasons for such differences would also be investigated. It is not surprising to find that many Chinese characters are given different pronunciations in the two dictionaries as the two dictionaries use two different approaches to determine the correct Cantonese pronunciations. The pronunciations recorded in the Guangzhouhua zhengyin zidian are the Cantonese pronunciations commonly used in Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Macau, whilst those recorded in the Yueyin zhengdu zihui are mainly based on the fanqie（反切） recorded in the Guangyun《廣韻》and the Jiyun《集韻》, which were both published in Song Dynasty. Significant differences regarding the criteria of determining the correct Cantonese pronunciations are found in the 3 editions of the Yueyin zhengdu zihui. It is surprising that a tendency of giving more emphasis to the pronunciations commonly used is found in the 2nd and 3rd editions. / published_or_final_version / Chinese Language and Literature / Master / Master of Arts

This thesis talks about the structure of ideophones in Southern Sinitic. Ideophone is an interesting word class that has been studies in a world atlas, while the Sinitic is just like an enclave under the context. This thesis is a try on analyzing the “state adjectives” and the onomatopoeia Chinese linguistics used to call from the ideophonic perspective. Treating Ruihong (a sub-dialect of Gan) as an entry point, structural markedness of ideophones in Southern Sinitic is described in a formal-functional way. At last, some typological attributes of the Sinitic ideophones have been summarized. Chapter 5 to Chapter 9 is the part of descriptive introduction. Each chapter picks one or several relevant forms of ideophones, and then start analysis about their structural markedness. Each Chapter has its emphasis: Chapter 5 focuses on how to identifying an ideophone from its phonotactic distribution, lack of written form, flexible word class and sound symbolism; Chapter 6 is about the most important XA ideophones in Ruihong, descriptions on characteristics like high tone and checked tone’s wide usage, disappearance of nasal coda after syllable final stop, grammaticalization and deideophonization, etc. are elaborated. Chapter 7 is about two reduplicative forms XX and AXX, comparison on the usage of XA and AXX between Gan, Xiang and other southern Sinitic is this chapter’s focus. Chapter 8 is mainly about prosodic features of the onomatopoeia and the mimicking words. Chapter 9 tries to connect the form and the semantic function, using AABB and AliXY and infix “pat” as examples, a detailed description about how these forms connect with meanings has been given. At last, in the conclusion, summary about the common points and differences in Southern Sinitic are listed. Basically, in the phonetic and phonological part, there are more common points, while in the morpho-syntactic part, differentiation is more apparent. / published_or_final_version / Linguistics / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / Language Studies / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / Language Studies / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Linguistics / Master / Master of Philosophy