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Right Dislocation in Cantonese: An Emotion-Intensifying Device

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Chinese Lexical Semantics (CLSW 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11173))

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Abstract

This paper explores the emotive function of Cantonese right dislocation based on language samples in a large spoken Cantonese database. Right dislocation is found to be highly associated with emotion expressions. In particular, explicit emotion words always appear in the first part of right dislocation. We argue that right dislocation is used as a focus marking device for highlighting emotion information and intensifying emotions. Therefore, right dislocation can serve as one of the linguistic cues for identifying implicit emotions.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by a General Research Fund (GRF) project sponsored by the Research Grants Council (Project No. B-Q50Z) and a PolyU Faculty Research Grant (Project No. 1-ZEVK).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Hong Kong

    Sophia Yat Mei Lee & Christy Choi Ting Lai

Authors
  1. Sophia Yat Mei Lee
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  2. Christy Choi Ting Lai
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Christy Choi Ting Lai .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Jia-Fei Hong

  2. Peking University, Beijing, China

    Qi Su

  3. National Chung Cheng University, Chiayi, Taiwan

    Jiun-Shiung Wu

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Lee, S.Y.M., Lai, C.C.T. (2018). Right Dislocation in Cantonese: An Emotion-Intensifying Device. In: Hong, JF., Su, Q., Wu, JS. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11173. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04015-4_35

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04015-4_35

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-04014-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-04015-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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