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Article published In: Language and Linguistics
Vol. 24:4 (2023) ► pp.674–732

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Rethinking postverbal ‘acquire’ and related constructions in Cantonese

Polyfunctionality and parameters

 | Hong Kong Shue Yan University
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

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Published online: 14 September 2023
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lali.00143.chi
Abstract
This paper revisits a well-established areal phenomenon in Mainland Southeast Asia and Northern Europe involving an element, ACQ(UIRE), that functions as a lexical verb meaning ‘to get or acquire’ and appears, as a functional item, in numerous seemingly unrelated constructions such as modal constructions, resultatives, descriptive complementation, and focus constructions. This paper presents a generative framework for the postverbal ACQ-structures in Hong Kong Cantonese involving the marker dak1. The proposed framework takes into account four readings of postverbal ACQ-sentences, namely potential, permission, descriptive, and focus, and argues that all postverbal ACQ-structures in Cantonese share the same basic configuration in which the ACQ heads a vP-internal ModP which expresses possibility modality and selects a small clause XP. The postverbal ACQ takes an AspP as complement which indicates the (non-)realization of the projected endpoint. The interpretational difference and other structural variations are boiled down to the three parameters realized in featural terms as: [±Realised] on Asp0, [±Possibility] and [±Deontic] on Mod0. The analysis also provides an explanation for several long-standing issues, including the verb-copying phenomenon, the co-occurrence of dak1 with the modal auxiliary ho2ji5, the distribution of the A-not-A form and negation, and the across-the-board aspectual incompatibility in postverbal ACQ-structures. The parametric framework demonstrates how apparently unrelated ACQ-constructions are closely connected with each other and provide a testable model to account for cross-linguistic variation found in other ACQ languages.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous literature on Cantonese postverbal ACQ-sentences
    • 2.1The modal readings
    • 2.2The non-modal readings
  • 3.The core proposal
    • 3.1The postverbal ACQ structure: A unification
    • 3.2Deriving the modal reading: [−Realised] [+Possibility]
      • 3.2.1Deriving a potential reading
      • 3.2.2Deriving a permission reading
      • 3.2.3Why ambiguous?
      • 3.2.4Modal concord
    • 3.3Deriving the descriptive reading: [+Realised] [+Possibility]
      • 3.3.1Descriptive-potential ambiguity is achievement-ability implicature
      • 3.3.2What is the AP describing?
        • 3.3.2.1A discourse salient object
        • 3.3.2.2The definiteness constraint
        • 3.3.2.3Manner vs. result modification
      • 3.3.3Why is ACQ obligatory?
  • 4.Further application of the proposed analysis
    • 4.1Across-the-board aspectual incompatibility in postverbal ACQ-sentences
    • 4.2Linearization and morphological status of postverbal ACQ
    • 4.3Postverbal ACQ and focus
      • 4.3.1Cantonese postverbal dak1 as focus operator?
      • 4.3.2Other related focus phenomena: A-not-A formation and negation scope
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
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