Readers 读者
Verb Serialization in Cantonese: A lexical-Functional Grammar Approach
广州话的连谓结构：词汇功能语法分析
Olivia S.-C Lam 林思骋
Abstract 摘要
This paper focuses on the development of constraints towards a characterization of the serial verb construct. Based on earlier works such as Bodomo (1997, 1998), a number of constraints on verb serialization are critically reviewed with respect to Cantonese. The analysis draws from a corpus of more than 20 paradigmatic sets of sentences in Cantonese. These were collected from written sources, such as magazines, and spoken sources, including face-to-face communication and TV and radio broadcasts (Lam 2001). A set of constraints that characterize verb serialization as a syntactico-semantic construct in Cantonese is developed. These constraints include the following: (a) the subject sameness constraint, (b) the aspect and polarity constraint, (c) the connector constraint, (d) the Predicate constraint, (e) the modal auxiliary constraint, and (f) the XCOMP constraint. These constraints are also believed to be commensurate with certain Lexical-Functional Grammatical (LFG) assumptions of predicates and clauses.