UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 14 (2002)

Cantonese sentence-final particles and the CP domain

ANN LAW


 

This paper proposes two syntactic positions for the wide range of Cantonese sentence-final particles that occur in the CP domain.  The first position that I argue for is identified with the Force head (SFP1) of the C space (à la Rizzi 1997) which hosts particles that express speech acts and speaker-oriented modality.  The second position (SFP2) is an iterative head located lower than the higher Topic.  This proposal not only captures facts about the co-occurrence and ordering restrictions of particle clusters, but also some previously unobserved behaviours of particles with quantified noun phrases and different types of questions.


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