A Comparative Study on Aspectual Systems of the Lianjiang Yue Dialect and Hong Kong Cantonese

Traditional studies on Chinese dialects mainly focus on pairing the relevant characters with their corresponding phonetic symbols, with little attention paid to their grammatical properties. It was not until recently that dialectal grammarians have started to explore grammatical divergences of different Chinese dialects, and some linguists have even attempted to incorporate modern linguistic theories into dialectal studies. This project aims to provide an in-depth comparison between the aspectual systems of the Yue dialects spoken in Hong Kong (HKC) and in Lianjiang (LJY), a city in far western Guangdong, from both historical and formal perspectives. The study would lead us to have a better understanding of:the structures of the aspectual systems of HKC and LJY and their syntactic / semantic discrepancies;the historical development of the Yue aspectual system in light of competing contributions from internal dynamics and from external contact with other Chinese dialects such as Min and Hakka; andthe mode of which historical linguistics and formal linguistics interact based on the results from (a) and (b).