Directional Particles in Cantonese: Form, Function and Grammaticalization , by Winnie Chor

Reviewed by Yuk-man Carine Yiu

Excerpt 节选

1. OVERVIEW OF DIRECTIONAL PARTICLES IN CANTONESE: FORM, FUNCTION AND GRAMMATICALIZATION

Traced back to verbs which denote direction and often referred to as directional complements in the literature, the twelve directional morphemes under investigation in Cantonese exhibit versatile usages. Despite that their number is small, the behaviors of this group of morphemes are heterogeneous. While most of them can be followed by a nominal which denotes location, hei2起 ‘raise (something) up’ and hoi1開 ‘move away’ cannot. Moreover, the grammaticalization paths that they have undergone are significantly different even for those of the antonymic pairs. While the directional meanings of all the morphemes have developed into abstract, non-directional and figurative meanings, only the meanings of some have evolved further to express the subjective evaluation of the speaker. The idiosyncrasies of this group of morphemes have attracted much attention from scholars. However, to this date, there is no systematic study of their evolution, a gap filled by Winnie Chor’s Directional Particles in Cantonese: Form, Function and Grammaticalization. In the monograph, the author explores how the spatial usages of this group of morphemes have developed into non-spatial usages using both diachronic and synchronic data from Cantonese. There are seven chapters in the book, including an introduction, five main chapters and a conclusion, followed by a section of references, a list of the complete citations of examples from the database and an index.

Chapter 1 provides a brief background of Cantonese, an overview of the grammaticalization studies in the West and Chinese and a discussion of phenomena often observed cross-linguistically during the grammaticalization process such as loss of morphosyntactic autonomy, semantic reduction, pragmatic enrichment, phonological attrition, persistence and unidirectionality. The twelve directional morphemes studied are introduced, including two which have a speaker-oriented reference point lai4嚟 ‘come,’ heoi3去 ‘go’ and ten which have a non-speaker-oriented reference point ceot1出 ‘move out,’ jap6入 ‘move in,’ hoi1開 ‘move away,’ maai4埋 ‘move towards,’ soeng5上 ‘ascend,’ lok6落 ‘descend,’ hei2起 ‘raise (something) up,’ dou3到 ‘arrive,’ faan1返 ‘move back,’ and gwo3過 ‘move across.’ Also, the data based on which analyses of the twelve directional morphemes are carried out are presented, and they span almost two centuries, consisting of pedagogical materials in Cantonese compiled between 1828 and 1941, scripts of films screened in the 1950s, 1970s and 1990s and data collected in the late 1990s. The goals of the author are to trace the development of the twelve directional morphemes in Cantonese with a special emphasis on the discourse-pragmatic aspect and to identify the mechanisms involved in their changes.

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Winnie Chor’s book Directional Particles in Cantonese: Form, Function and Grammaticalization is a systematic investigation of the development of a set of twelve directional morphemes in Cantonese in the frameworks of grammaticalization and language change. Data from early Cantonese and contemporary Cantonese have been used to show how the directional usages of the morphemes have developed into their versatile usages including temporal and discourse-pragmatic meanings since the nineteenth century. Findings of the study contribute not only to the studies of Cantonese linguistics and grammaticalization, but also enhance our understanding of the development of the versatile usages of this set of morphemes, usages which may not seem to relate to their sources in any obvious way.

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