Focus Manifestation in Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese

Descripción

"One prominent function of natural language is to convey information, and one peculiarity is that it does not do so randomly, but in a structured way, with information structuring formally recognized to be a component of grammar. Among all information structuring notions, focus is one primitive needed to account for all phenomena. Focus Manifestation in Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese: A Comparative Perspective aims to examine from a semantic perspective how syntactic structures and focus adverbs in Mandarin Chinese and semantic particles in Cantonese, with particular focus given to co-occurrence of adverbs, verbal suffixes and sentence-final particles, conspire to encode focus structures and determine focus manifestation in Chinese"--