Completing the Completive: (Re)constructing Early Cantonese Grammar
[译]：构拟早期粤语语法
Hung-nin Sanmuel Cheung 张洪年

Abstract 摘要

1.INTRODUCTION
While dialectology has always been an important area of investigation in Chinese linguistics, diachronic inquiry has thus far focused primarily on the use of dialectal materials to reconstruct ancient sound systems. Studies of dialectal grammar with a historical perspective have not been particularly productive, a situation that is due not so much to lack of interest as to shortage of data. For centuries, the classical language was the base for all major forms of writing, a tradition that supplies little record of the grammatical evolution in the spoken language. Granted that there was an emerging trend for composing in the vernacular since the Tang dynasty, the majority of such work was written in Mandarin of one form or another. Early writings in other dialects were few, and the scarcity is even more pronounced in Cantonese. Unlike the Wu and Min dialects which saw some productions of fiction and drama in regional idioms as early as the 16th century, the earliest extant work in Cantonese is a collection of folksongs that dates to the early 19th century. However, because of the collection’s composite style of mixing the vernacular with the classical, the songs did not necessarily reveal much about the underlying grammatical operations of spoken Cantonese. Neither did the publication of the anthology encourage the practice of dialectal writing in other forms of composition. In fact, it was not until the middle of the 20th century that a large quantity of Cantonese writings began to appear, especially in newspapers that catered to a native readership in Hong Kong. Interest in Cantonese grammar as a linguistic discipline began in 1960s and studies since then have been essentially restricted to synchronic analyses of the contemporary language.

1.1 Linguistic Study of Cantonese
1.2 Sources Used for This Study

2. THE PERFECTIVE ASPECT
2.1 The Perfective Jo
2.2 The Perfective Hiu
2.3 Relationship between Hiu and Jo
2.4 Verbal Tonal Modification
2.5 The Use of Liuh
2.6 Development of Perfective
2.7 The Origin of Jo

3. CONCLUSION