Submitted by
for the degree of Master of Philosophy
at The University of Hong Kong
in September 1999
| This study aims at examining the characteristics of Cantonese adjectives in respect of morphology, syntax and semantics. I have collected about 1,000 Cantonese adjectives, many of which were from speech data. These were examined in the context of the sentence in which they were found. The data show that Cantonese adjectives can be divided into two main groups: simple and complex adjectives. The two groups of adjectives behave in different ways at the level of syntax. Complex adjectives are derived from simple ones. One common way of deriving complex adjectives is reduplication. Eighteen reduplication forms have been identified. In addition, alliteration and rhyming are used to derive complex forms. Morphologically and syntactically, adjectives may appear to behave like verbs, in that they can also take aspect markers and objects. But when adjectives take aspects, the grammatical meanings expressed tend to be different from verbs taking aspects. For example, 'ADJ+ zo2' typically indicates change of state, rather than completion. Adjectives taking objects often carry a comparative meaning, something which is never true of verbs taking objects. On the whole, the syntactic functions of Cantonese adjectives are similar to those of Modern Chinese adjectives. Both groups an function as predicative, can modify nouns in the attributive position, modify verbs in the verb complement position and serve as adverbials. But they behave differently as modifiers to nouns and verbs, and as verb complements. In Cantonese, the different functions are marked more clearly with different function words. Semantically, Cantonese adjectives are gradable and stative, but some are non-gradable and dynamic. On the whole, it is useful to establish adjectives as a separate word class given their many morphological, syntactic, and semantic characteristics as a group. |