The potential complement construction: A study of early Cantonese

Verb complements can be defined as a construction that qualifies a preceding verb or adjective and is often marked by [Special character omitted]. Cantonese displays a variety of complements, including extent, degree, resultative, manner, directional and potential.;This dissertation concentrates on the potential complement in early Cantonese, a construction that has undergone different stages of development during the last two centuries. In particular, I shall trace and reconstruct the changes as observed in language materials from 1828 to 1955. Compiled by native pedagogues or foreign missionaries dedicated to learning the local tongue, the materials include language textbooks, dictionaries and translations of the Bible. As they constitute a rich corpus of colloquial Cantonese in the last two hundred years, the data provide a reliable basis for a diachronic comparison between early and contemporary Cantonese in the use of the potential complement.;The potential sentences collected from the data are examined under three different, thought related, categories: the positive, the negative and the interrogative. Patterns of development are outlined and both syntactic and semantic features of the patterns are discussed in detail.;Structurally, the dissertation is divided into two main parts. The first part gives a general characterization of the potential complement in modern Cantonese (Chapters 1 & 2). The second part deals with the development of the potential complement in early Cantonese. The main discussion is conducted in six sections: (1) The comparison of potential complement between early and modern Cantonese (Chap.3); (2) The discussion of the "permission" reading in the potential complement (Chap.4); (3) The positive form of the potential complement with a focus on its syntactic and semantic features and also with regard to its counterpart in Mandarin Chinese (Chapter 5); (4) The negative form of the potential complement, with a focus on the change in formation of the negative form, such as from [V-NEG-C] to [NEG-V-dak-C], etc., and the semantic differences thereby entailed (Chapter 6); (5) The A- not- A interrogative form, with a focus on the variation in form in different decades (Chapter 7); (6) The analysis of the potential complement with adjective predicates, a construction that is often neglected in previous studies (Chap.8).;Unlike many languages that adopt a modal verb to express the reading of ability or possibility of an action or state, Chinese prefers the use of a potential complement. The construction has attracted great interests from scholars in the past, and their efforts have focused primarily on the historical development of the Chinese potential as documented in writings from the ancient times to the present. Studies on the potential complement in Cantonese, however, are rare.