Rethinking
Cantonese grammar: typology, processing and acquisition
Project reference no: HKU7482/07H
Principal
investigator: Stephen
Matthews
The
project aims to revisit selected issues in the grammar of Cantonese from three
complementary perspectives which have been investigated in the researchers'
recent projects. The typological perspective offers a comparative dimension; the
processing perspective focuses on how speakers of the language process incoming
speech and formulate sentence structures in real time; and the acquisition
perspective considers how the same structures develop in children acquiring
Cantonese in monolingual and bilingual contexts. The intention is to use these
complementary perspectives as converging evidence to illuminate Cantonese
grammar.
The
study combines data from corpora and psycholinguistic experiments conducted by
the research team to shed light on the analysis of grammatical phenomena in
Cantonese. Besides leading to specialized studies of grammatical topics in the
form of journal articles, the work will contribute to a substantially revised
edition of the investigators’ influential work, Cantonese: A Comprehensive
Grammar, first published by Routledge in 1994. The results are expected to
contribute to theoretical and empirical issues in the study of Cantonese
grammar. The findings of the project will also be useful to a wide range of
professionals and researchers including linguists, psychologists, educators and
clinicians whose work involves Cantonese.