Distribution of additives and restrictives in Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese

This chapter shows the distributional differences of additive adverbs and post-verbal particles in Mandarin and Cantonese, and the ability of these particles to co-occur. The interim conclusions deduced from additives and restrictives suggest that when focus markers of multiple forms occur in the same sentence, it is their word order that determines their interpretations. To verify the hypothesis that the co-occurrence of focus particles in Cantonese and Mandarin is facilitated by the linearity principle. The chapter examines co-occurrence patterns of additive particles in Cantonese, followed by restrictives. As additive verbal suffixes and sentence-final particles are absent in Mandarin and additives are mainly adverbs, the co-occurrence of multiple forms of additives in Mandarin would be more restricted. The scope interpretation of additive adverbs and verbal suffixes is determined by the surface word order of additives and their associates, hence the linearity principle, under their individual interpretation conditions.