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Quantification in Cantonese

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Handbook of Quantifiers in Natural Language: Volume II

Part of the book series: Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy ((SLAP,volume 97))

Abstract

After presenting some basic genetic, historical and typological information about Cantonese, this chapter outlines the quantification patterns it expresses. It illustrates various semantic types of quantifiers, such as generalized existential, generalized universal, proportional, definite and partitive which are defined in the Quantifier Questionnaire in chapter “The Quantifier Questionnaire”. It partitions the expression of the semantic types into morpho-syntactic classes: Adverbial type quantifiers and Nominal (or Determiner) type quantifiers. For the various semantic and morpho-syntactic types of quantifiers it also distinguishes syntactically simple and syntactically complex quantifiers, as well as issues of distributivity and scope interaction, classifiers and measure expressions, and existential constructions. The chapter describes structural properties of determiners and quantified noun phrases in Cantonese, both in terms of internal structure (morphological or syntactic) and distribution.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The Romanization system for Mandarin Chinese used in this paper is Hanyu pinyin, and that for Cantonese is Jyut6ping3 (with tones indicated), a Cantonese Romanization scheme proposed by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong in 1993 (2nd edition published in 2002). For the sake of easier differentiation, romanizations without tones marked are Hanyu pinyin, and those with tones are Cantonese romanization. Hanyu pinyin and jyut6ping3 are italicized throughout the paper.

  2. 2.

    Like Mandarin –xie which is considered to be a classifier that signals plurality, represented as CLPL, by Li and Thompson (1981). -Xie occurs with the numeral yi “one”, with yi-xie ‘one-CLPL’ giving the “some” meaning. Like Mandarin, Cantonese has the plural classifier di1, which also occurs with the numeral jat1 ‘one’, but not any other numerals, with jat1-di1 together giving the meaning of “some”.

  3. 3.

    Abbreviations used in this paper include – CL: classifiers; CLPL: plural classifiers; COMP: comparative morphemes; Exp: experiential markers; Perf: perfective makers; Prog: progressive markers; and SFP: sentence-final particles.

  4. 4.

    The existential meaning conveyed by [CL-N] will be discussed in Section 2.1(c).

  5. 5.

    Previous studies on Cantonese define “verbal suffix” as the suffix that follows the resultative verb compound (V + R-complement) to form the construction “V + R-complement + suffix” (cf. H.N. Cheung 1972/2007; Gao 1980; Yue-Hashimoto 1993; Matthews and Yip 1994).

  6. 6.

    GEN stands for “generic quantifier”. Heim (1982) posits that all quantifiers have a tripartite structure: quantifier, restrictor and matrix, written as “Restrictor” and “Matrix” in (50).

  7. 7.

    For the semantic representation of English “much” readers are referred to Kennedy (1999), Hackl (2000), and McNally and Kennedy (2008), etc.

  8. 8.

    For the concept of “orientation of scale”, readers are referred to Anscombre and Ducrot (1983).

  9. 9.

    This point was pointed out by the reviewer, and the author would like to thank the reviewer for his/her valuable comments.

  10. 10.

    Partee’s (1987, 1991) identifies two major types of quantifiers: D(eterminer)-quantifiers and A(dverbial)-quantifiers, where D stands for “determiner” and A for the cluster of adverbs, auxiliaries, affixes and argument-structure adjusters. A-quantifiers are further divided into two subtypes in Partee (1995): (i) true A-quantifiers, which mainly refer to preverbal A-quantifiers and adverbs of quantification (Q-adverbs) along the lines of Lewis (1975) and Heim (1982), and (ii) lexical quantifiers which have an operator, quantificational in nature, applying to the verb or other predicate at the lexical level, with (potentially) morphological, syntactic and semantic effects on the argument structure of the predicate in question. –Saai as a particle attached to the verb, can be categorized as a lexical quantifier, based on Partee’s classification of A-quantifiers, which is also on a par with Tang (1996).

  11. 11.

    The author would like to thank the editor for pointing out the significance of this feature.

  12. 12.

    Adopting a syntactic-pragmatic approach, Tang (2006) proposed a classification of inner particles and outer particles, with the former occupying the Head of TP and the latter the Head of CP. Under Rizzi’s (1997) Split-CP framework, Li (2006) proposes two functional projections for SFPs within the CP domain: SFP2 occupies the head of SFP2P under TopicP, and SFP1 the Head of ForceP, with Evid, Disc, Mood, Foc and Fin being the functional heads of these projections. Readers are referred to Tang (2006) and Li (2006) for the detailed analyses.

  13. 13.

    Chinese Romanization in the References part follows Hanyu Pinyin. Book/paper titles represented in this form are written in Chinese.

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Acknowledgements

The work described in this paper was partially supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No: CityU 143113). The author thus acknowledges its generous support. Sincere thanks also go to the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their detailed and invaluable comments and suggestions. Any errors remain the author’s.

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  1. Department of Linguistics and Translation, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, People’s Republic of China

    Peppina Po-lun Lee

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  1. LORIA (UMR 7503), CNRS, Vandoeuvre-lès-Nancy, France

    Denis Paperno

  2. Dept. of Linguistics 3125 Campbell Hall, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, USA

    Edward L. Keenan

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Lee, P.Pl. (2017). Quantification in Cantonese. In: Paperno, D., Keenan, E. (eds) Handbook of Quantifiers in Natural Language: Volume II. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 97. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44330-0_3

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