Published Online: Dec 31, 2020
Page range: 109 - 138
Received: Jan 22, 2020
Accepted: Nov 03, 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/scl-2020-0004
Keywords
© 2020 John C. Wakefield, published by Sciendo
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Adopting the cartographic approach, this paper proposes syntactic positions for all left-periphery particles above the tense phrase (TP) in Cantonese. These include both sentence-final particles and sentence-initial particles that can be used in isolation as interjections. Based on previous syntactic proposals for the left periphery, a modification of Rizzi’s (2001) split-complementizer phrase (Split-CP) structure is proposed. A Deictic Phrase (DeicP) is added above the finite phrase (FinP) for the Cantonese “tense” particles