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

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.

In Chapter 2, the reasons for adopting the term 'particle' rather than 'complement,' the latter of which is a term more often used in the literature, to refer to the twelve directional morphemes under investigation are discussed. According to the author, the terms 'complement' and "particle" are used differently in English and Chinese. In English, 'complement' is a grammatical function which prototypically refers to a constituent which is necessary to complete the meaning of a phrase, whereas 'particle' refers to a word-class. In contrast, in Chinese, bŭyŭ 補語 'complement' often refers to the second verbal element in a VV compound which describes the state or result as denoted by the preceding verb, whereas 'particle' is a bound form. To avoid any confusion, the author adopts the term 'particle' to refer to the twelve morphemes examined. Another reason for using the term 'particle' rather than 'complement' is that there are cases in which the potential infixes dak1 'able' or m4 'not' cannot be inserted between the twelve morphemes studied and their preceding verbs, situations which suggest that these morphemes have lost their morphological independence and have become bound forms. Therefore, they are not complements. The author has further drawn evidence from English particles to show that the directional morphemes in Cantonese resemble the particles in English phrasal verbs in expressing both concrete directional...