Cantonese Particles and Affixal Quantification (Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory) <Vol. 87>

Cantonese, the lingua franca of Hong Kong and its neighboring province, has an unusually rich repertoire of verbal particles. The author shows how these verbal suffixes display a unique interplay of syntax and semantics: used in a sentence with no focus, they quantify items flexibly, according to an accessibility hierarchy;