A syntactic account of deictic sentence initial particles
Ben Au Yeung (UST)
In the light of the identification of the deictic properties of Cantonese initial particles
in Luke (1996, 2001) and Au-Yeung (2000), I will demonstrate the need for a
syntactic account of the deictic particles, le1/2 and naa4 (the free forms) as well as
zi1- (the bound form, as in zi1-so2ji5, zi1-bat1gwo3), and argue for Complementizer
Phrase to accommodate them. Then I will show that the deictic portion of today’s
initial particle system did leave its trace in Old Cantonese as in 《麥仕治廣州俗話
〈書經〉解義》(1833/1893).
The devices used to show the deictic particles are structure-dependent are:
- sentence fillers: Can the deictic particles be inserted as freely in a sentence as those
true sentence fillers?
- final particles: Do the particles need to match final particles in terms of mood?
- wh-questions: Are the particles sensitive to wh-words?
- topics and anaphors: Do they have directional constrains on their anaphoric relation
with topics?
- focus: Will they be attracted by focus?
Just a glance of these categories will reveal their being at ‘the cutting edge’ of a
sentence, such as Complementizer Phrase, Focus Phrase, Topic Phrase, Mood Phrase
and so on. I will pick Complementizer Phrase as a point of departure to handle the
distribution of the deictic particles with an emphasis on the wh-words and the final
particles because these two categories are demonstrably argued to occupy the CP level
in the literature. If the CP account of le1/2 and naa4 is on the right track, then the
position of the bound initial particle zi1- will be easily borne out.
The Old Cantonese used in this paper is adopted from the book called 《麥仕治廣州
俗話〈書經〉解義》, first introduced in Yue (2000). With a total of 185 pages, it is a
Cantonese version of the translation of an old Chinese text called《尚書》. If a certain
number of initial particles were found in this textual material, it could imply that the
actual verbal language could have a richer inventory. Before looking into the text to
see how the deictic particles and the initial particle system developed, we can ask:
-
Did the Old Cantonese have le1/2 and naa1/2 or their variants?
Did the language have other particles with various degree of deicticity?
Should it be likely to have the bound zi1- since it was inherited from Old Chinese?
What did the inventory of initial particles look like in the text in general?