Introduction
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Introduction While a number of grammars of Mandarin Chinese are available, a sub- stantial reference grammar of Cantonese written in English has long been lacking. Chao Yuen-Ren’s A Cantonese Primer (originally written in 1947) devotes only a brief, though valuable, chapter to grammar, while Samuel Cheung Hung-Nin’s landmark grammar A Grammar of Cantonese as Spoken in Hong Kong ଉཽᆕऄऱઔߒ (1972, revised edition 2007) is available only in Chinese. The more thorough language courses such as Parker Huang and Gerald Kok’s Speak Cantonese deal with grammar only in a sporadic fashion, and were written in the 1960s. Subsequent develop- ments in the language, as well as in the linguistic description of Chinese, make a reference grammar all the more necessary. The first edition of this book, published in 1994, was intended to fill this long-standing gap. The general lack of attention to Cantonese grammar is remarkable in view of the vital role of Cantonese as a lingua franca in Hong Kong, Macau, Guangzhou and overseas Cantonese communities. While many Hong Kong people can communicate in English, there have always been some Westerners in Hong Kong and abroad who have attempted to learn some Cantonese. The language has acquired the reputation of being difficult for second language learners: indeed the subtly differentiated tones and consonants which seem initially awkward, in addition to unfamiliar sentence structures, present daunting challenges. This impression is unfortunate, however, since in certain other respects the language is relatively simple: there are no case forms or verb conjugations as in European languages, for example, and a minimum of inflectional forms to be learnt. It is the word order and syntactic structures that constitute the major grammatical difficulties. A number of reasons may explain why so few grammars of Cantonese are available. Cantonese is regarded as a dialect, not having the status of a full-fledged language, even by its speakers. Even linguists have tended to 1 Copyrighted Material - Taylor & Francis Introduction assume that the Chinese ‘dialects’ share the same or similar grammar. Furthermore, Cantonese is essentially a spoken language. Grammars – as opposed to phrase-books – traditionally take the written form of a language as the standard to be described. To the extent that Cantonese is written down at all, it is heavily affected by standard written Chinese, which is based on Mandarin; as a result, there is no clear distinction between what is ‘Cantonese’ and what is ‘Mandarin’ (see below on the relationship between written and spoken Cantonese), rendering a grammar of written Cantonese impracticable. In the descriptive approach to linguistics on which this book is based, the spoken form of any language is taken to be primary, the written form derivative;1 we thus reject any notion of the superiority of written language and the devaluation of spoken Cantonese which all too often results from such attitudes. The present grammar is intended to meet the needs of the following kinds of readers: (a) learners using the grammar in conjunction with a language course; (b) those who use some Cantonese socially and professionally but are looking to improve their grammatical knowledge and the accuracy of their language; (c) those with some knowledge of Mandarin who are interested in Cantonese for comparative or practical reasons; (d) linguists working on aspects of Cantonese or looking for a detailed description of a variety of Chinese other than Mandarin; (e) Cantonese speakers, such as teachers of English and speech therapists, who wish to develop their metalinguistic awareness of the language; (f) teachers of English to Cantonese speakers who want to learn more about their students’ first language; (g) teachers and students of translation/interpretation to and from Cantonese. In order to make the book as accessible as possible, we have sought to use a minimum of linguistic terminology. The language and its speakers Cantonese is the most widely known and influential variety of Chinese other than Mandarin. It belongs to the Yue group of dialects (Cantonese Yuhtyúh ᆕ, as in Yuhtyúh pín ᆕׂ ‘Cantonese film’ and Yuhtkehk 2 ᆕᏣ ‘Cantonese opera’). Yue dialects are spoken primarily in the southern Copyrighted Material - Taylor & Francis Chinese provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi, and in the neighbouring Introduction territories of Hong Kong and Macau.2 Cantonese as spoken in Hong Kong is generally known as GwóngdEng Wá ᐖࣟᇩ, after the province of Guangdong. Varieties of Cantonese are also used in Chinese communities in Singapore, Malaysia, North America, Australia and elsewhere as a result of emigration from the Guangdong area and from Hong Kong itself. According to the Ethnologue (Lewis 2009), native speakers of Yue dialects in all countries amount to some 55 million, ranking sixteenth in the top 100 languages by population. Having been a British colony for over 150 years, Hong Kong has recognized both Cantonese and Mandarin, alongside English, as official languages since the handover of sovereignty to China in 1997. The official language policy of Hong Kong léuhng màhn sAam yúh ֮ࠟ Կ, calls for its citizens to be ‘biliterate and trilingual’, speaking Cantonese, Putonghua and English and being literate in both English and standard written Chinese. Within China, far from being replaced by Mandarin, Cantonese enjoys growing prestige as a result of the rapid economic development of the southern coastal districts led by Guangdong province. Students around China learn Cantonese in order to do business with Hong Kong and Guangdong: Ղ) at the same timeק Cantonese is said to be ‘heading north’ (bAk séuhng as Mandarin progresses southwards (làahm hah তՀ: Zhan 1993). The usage described in this grammar is that of Hong Kong Cantonese. Traditionally, the speech of Guangzhou (Canton) is the standard of com- ,ᇩ and ‘Cantonese’; howeverڠparison, hence the terms GwóngjAu Wá ᐖ the majority of Western users of the language will have more contact with Hong Kong Cantonese. In Singapore, Malaysia and the overseas Chinese communities, there are distinctive varieties; yet the influence of Hong Kong Cantonese is strong, due in part to films, television programmes and ‘Canto-pop’. The impact and popularity of Hong Kong Cantonese in all these different forms spread through pop culture naturally contribute to its growing prestige. The descriptive approach In keeping with the goals of the Reference Grammars series, this volume aims at comprehensive coverage, providing reference for the student and scholar of the language while foregrounding the more essential aspects of sentence structure for the benefit of the learner-user. 3 Copyrighted Material - Taylor & Francis Introduction As a grammar of the spoken language, the book is intended to reflect current usage. Several features of Cantonese described in earlier works are omitted because they are not representative of the Cantonese currently spoken in Hong Kong. For example, the high level and high falling tones are considered to be non-distinctive (see below on the romanization system); as a result, the tone sandhi rule changing a high falling tone to high level as described by Chao (1947) is no longer operative. In cases of doubt, the usage followed reflects that of the second author, a native Cantonese speaker born and raised in Hong Kong. The grammar adopts the descriptive approach which is the basis of modern linguistics: it aims to describe how the language is actually spoken, rather than to tell the reader how it should be spoken. For example, the pronun- ciation léih is adopted in place of the traditional néih ܃ ‘you’. Under this approach, there is no issue of ‘correct’, ‘good’ or ‘bad’ Cantonese (except perhaps in reference to a non-native speaker’s use of the language, where ‘good’ means ‘approximating to a native speaker’s usage’). The fallacy of ‘correct’ pronunciation Like many languages, Cantonese suffers from a misguided tradition of prescriptivism, whereby self-appointed ‘experts’ prescribe ‘correct’ forms. Whereas in English the focus of such prescriptions is on grammar, in Cantonese it falls on pronunciation. Certain pronunciations resulting from sound change are considered ‘sloppy’ or ‘lazy’ (láahn yAm ᡗଃ). The ‘correct ଃ) approach is a prime example of a prescriptive approachإ) ’pronunciation to language, in which prescriptions for ‘proper’ language use are handed out by an authority. Such an approach may be contrasted with a ‘descriptive’ one, which aims to describe facts about language objectively. It is widely acknowledged in linguistics that the prescriptive approach lacks any scientific basis (see e.g. Pinker 1994). In Cantonese, prescriptive rules largely take the form of specifying ‘correct pronunciations’. Thus néih ܃ ‘you’ is specified as ‘correct’ and léih as ‘incorrect’ or ‘lazy’. There are numerous fallacies here, including the following: (a) The ‘lazy’ pronunciation léih is the result of a well-documented sound change whereby the consonant /n/ at the beginning of the word changes to /l/. This particular change has been documented in detail since the work of Chao Yuen-Ren and Wong Shek-Ling in the 1930s (when it was still in progress) to the present, when it is essentially complete. High 4 frequency words such as néih/léih ‘you’ and nC/lC ‘this’ are typically the Copyrighted Material - Taylor & Francis last to be affected by the sound change. Such sound changes are a Introduction natural feature of all languages (Aitchison 2001). (b) The selection of néih as the ‘correct’ form is entirely arbitrary. Materials from the nineteenth century show that the word was then pronounced níh, and that the diphthong [ei] developed from [i]. We have a well- documented series of sound changes: níh néih léih. There is no basis whatsoever for selecting the historically intermediate form néih, which happens to have been the predominant pronunciation during the early twentieth century, as the ‘correct’ one. (c) There is no reason to believe that teaching and conscious correction will be able to reverse such sound changes, either in individuals or at the level of the Hong Kong speech community.