Inner aspect in Cantonese
Ka-Fai Yip
May 2025 

[Published in FLaP FIRST, vol.1:15-36. Reviews and replies are open access, click here to view.]

The paper provides the first systematic study of the structural properties of inner aspect in Cantonese. In total 14 postverbal inner aspectual elements have been identified (e.g., completive jyun in sik-jyun ‘finish eating’). It is shown that they occupy a middle position: above resultative verbal complements (e.g., baau ‘full’ in sik-baau ‘eat and become full’), but below outer aspectual elements (e.g., perfective -zo in sik-zo ‘ate’). Syntactically, they are lower than vP but may be either higher or lower than VP. Furthermore, while some of them are phase complements, some others have already become or are on their way to becoming verbal suffixes.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008705 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	FLaP FIRST, vol.1:15-36
keywords:	inner aspect, phase complement, verbal suffixes, cantonese, morphology, syntax
previous versions:	v2 [December 2024] v1 [December 2024]
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