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postgraduate thesis: Developing descriptions: the emergence of Cantonese adjectival constructions in a bilingual child
Title | Developing descriptions: the emergence of Cantonese adjectival constructions in a bilingual child |
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Authors | |
Advisors | Advisor(s):Matthews, SJ |
Issue Date | 2011 |
Publisher | The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) |
Citation | Fung, W. [馮卉欣]. (2011). Developing descriptions : the emergence of Cantonese adjectival constructions in a bilingual child. (Thesis). University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong SAR. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.5353/th_b4852183 |
Abstract | The setting up of the lexical category ‘adjective’ in Chinese has been a controversial topic in linguistics. This is due to the phenomenon that in Chinese, among the group of words which denote properties of noun phrases, there is a notable amount manifesting the characteristics of verbs. That is, they can be potentially qualified as both verbs and adjectives. Over the years, studies on syntactic distributional patterns and semantics on this group of words have been carried out in order to address the problem. However, a theory which adequately describes this multifunctional category in the Chinese language still seems to be lacking.
To shed light on the issue, the current thesis investigates the behavior of words which are potentially considered as ‘adjectives’ occurring naturally in a Cantonese-English bilingual child’s corpus data. Patterns of child language development can provide a new perspective to the adjective-verb controversy in Cantonese from the viewpoint of language acquisition. At the same time, they might review whether interference between English and Cantonese occur. In this thesis, the use of adjectival verbs for attribution and predication, and the manner of their being modified are discussed. While the results in our data set do not show that English has prominent influence on the development of Cantonese in our subject, one of our major findings is that the distributional pattern of adjectival verbs in the child’s Cantonese is predominantly predicative. The current results contrast with theories supporting attributive use of adjectives as being the prototype. |
Degree | Master of Philosophy |
Subject | Cantonese dialects - Adjective. Bilingualism in children. |
Dept/Program | Linguistics |
Persistent Identifier | http://hdl.handle.net/10722/179992 |
HKU Library Item ID | b4852183 |
DC Field | Value | Language |
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dc.contributor.advisor | Matthews, SJ | - |
dc.contributor.author | Fung, Wei-yan. | - |
dc.contributor.author | 馮卉欣. | - |
dc.date.issued | 2011 | - |
dc.identifier.citation | Fung, W. [馮卉欣]. (2011). Developing descriptions : the emergence of Cantonese adjectival constructions in a bilingual child. (Thesis). University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong SAR. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.5353/th_b4852183 | - |
dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10722/179992 | - |
dc.description.abstract | The setting up of the lexical category ‘adjective’ in Chinese has been a controversial topic in linguistics. This is due to the phenomenon that in Chinese, among the group of words which denote properties of noun phrases, there is a notable amount manifesting the characteristics of verbs. That is, they can be potentially qualified as both verbs and adjectives. Over the years, studies on syntactic distributional patterns and semantics on this group of words have been carried out in order to address the problem. However, a theory which adequately describes this multifunctional category in the Chinese language still seems to be lacking. To shed light on the issue, the current thesis investigates the behavior of words which are potentially considered as ‘adjectives’ occurring naturally in a Cantonese-English bilingual child’s corpus data. Patterns of child language development can provide a new perspective to the adjective-verb controversy in Cantonese from the viewpoint of language acquisition. At the same time, they might review whether interference between English and Cantonese occur. In this thesis, the use of adjectival verbs for attribution and predication, and the manner of their being modified are discussed. While the results in our data set do not show that English has prominent influence on the development of Cantonese in our subject, one of our major findings is that the distributional pattern of adjectival verbs in the child’s Cantonese is predominantly predicative. The current results contrast with theories supporting attributive use of adjectives as being the prototype. | - |
dc.language | eng | - |
dc.publisher | The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) | - |
dc.relation.ispartof | HKU Theses Online (HKUTO) | - |
dc.rights | The author retains all proprietary rights, (such as patent rights) and the right to use in future works. | - |
dc.rights | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. | - |
dc.source.uri | http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B48521838 | - |
dc.subject.lcsh | Cantonese dialects - Adjective. | - |
dc.subject.lcsh | Bilingualism in children. | - |
dc.title | Developing descriptions: the emergence of Cantonese adjectival constructions in a bilingual child | - |
dc.type | PG_Thesis | - |
dc.identifier.hkul | b4852183 | - |
dc.description.thesisname | Master of Philosophy | - |
dc.description.thesislevel | Master | - |
dc.description.thesisdiscipline | Linguistics | - |
dc.description.nature | published_or_final_version | - |
dc.identifier.doi | 10.5353/th_b4852183 | - |
dc.date.hkucongregation | 2012 | - |
dc.identifier.mmsid | 991033921319703414 | - |