A Semantic Investigation of Post-verbal Focusing and Focus-sensitive Particles and Information Packaging in Cantonese

As compared to Mandarin, Cantonese demonstrates a unique feature of having an unusually rich repertoire of post-verbal particles which appear at a suffixal position attached to the verb, resulting in the sequence of “V(erb)+C(omplement)+Suffix” (henceforth, “verbal suffixes”) and sentence-final particles (henceforth, “SFPs”). This project aims to study the semantic properties and the information-structural characterization of the post-verbal focusing particles, namely the verbal suffixes and SFPs mentioned above, and compare them with their pre-verbal counterparts, namely focus adverbs. The study will also be extended to include those post-verbal particles which are sensitive to focus, to find out how they, together with post-verbal focusing particles and focus adverbs, help to encode information in the sentence. The ultimate objective of the project is to answer the question why Cantonese appeals to such a rich system of post-verbal particles, despite the existence of their pre-verbal counterparts, from the semantic aspect and most importantly, from the information-structural aspect. Moreover, does the great discrepancy in the number of post-verbal particles between Cantonese and Mandarin reflect a distinct system of information encoding in Cantonese? How post-verbal focusing and focus-sensitive particles and focus adverbs, with both being important and unique information-structural imports in Cantonese, divide their labor in terms of information packaging and partitioning? The project represents the first theoretical study which systematically examines Cantonese post-verbal particles from the semantic aspect and the aspect of information structuring. Although this research focuses on Cantonese, the ultimate goal is to find out the underlying principles or laws that govern the interaction of semantics with pragmatics and the packaging and partitioning of information in natural language. This study contributes to the current linguistic endeavor by reshaping and refining existing theories on focus and information structure. Besides its theoretical importance on the current linguistic theories, the description of features which are unique to Cantonese will prove useful in the learning of Cantonese and contrastive studies between Cantonese and Mandarin in the future.