Head movement with semantic effects: Aspectual verb raising in Cantonese

Hindi Aspectual Verb Complexes

One of the goals of syntax is to determine how much languages do vary, in the hope to be able to make hypothesis about how much natural languages can vary. The syntax of aspect is a fertile ground for comparing approaches to variation in the interface between syntax and semantics. Cinque (1999) is a leading example of a research program that attempts to show that at a particular level of repres...

Verb Raising in Questions

Running Head: CANTONESE EXPRESSIVE VOCABULARY Is the Expressive Vocabulary of Young Cantonese Speakers Noun or Verb Dominated?

The spontaneous utterances produced by 492 Cantonese-speaking children aged 36 to 60 months in 30-minute toy play contexts were collected. The incidence and percentage of different lexical classes, the ratio of noun and verb types and tokens were calculated. A statistically significant predominance of verb usage was found in the expressive utterances of the children. No similar predominance was...

Verb Movement in Kashmiri

Tensed clauses in Kashmiri are subject to the verb second constraint; the finite verbal element in these clauses always occurs in the second position, i.e. the position immediately following the first phrasal constituent. Like German however Kashmiri is argued to be underlyingly SOV. Evidence for underlying SOV word order comes primarily from environments where V2 does not apply such as non fin...

Effect of speech rate on pre-low raising in Cantonese

This paper investigates the effect of speech rate on pre-low raising in Cantonese. Pre-low raising is an anticipatory tonal process where a high tone is raised when followed by a low tone (i.e. the trigger). Six native speakers of Cantonese were recorded saying a disyllable in 36 tone combinations (6 tones× 6 tones) at two speech rates (normal and slow). It was found that in slow speech pre-low...