A Systemic Functional Grammar of Cantonese: From Clausal Grammar to Discourse Semantics

A Systemic Functional Grammar of Cantonese adopts Systemic Functional Linguistics to describe the grammar of Cantonese, and to push the description beyond the clausal level to the discourse level.

The book provides a comprehensive description of the Cantonese language, starting from the social and historical background, and the sound and word structure of Cantonese, including word, group, and phrase, to the grammar of clause and sentence. It then advances into the discourse of Cantonese, examining the compound and complex sentences, as well as the flow of information in Cantonese discourse and the elements which regulate the flow.

This volume will be informative for scholars and students studying the Cantonese language, and will provide a good starting point for those researching the language.

Eden Sum-hung Li had taught at the Open University of Hong Kong, Macquarie University and the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of A Systemic Functional Grammar of Chinese and Language, Society and Culture in Hong Kong, the first author of Systemic Functional Political Discourse Analysis: A Text-based Study and English Today: Forms, Functions and Uses and the co-author of Analysing, and Applying English Grammar and The Corpus of Hong Kong Political Discourse. In addition, Li has published more than 60 book chapters, international journal articles, proceedings, and conference papers, including Chapter 21 ’The nominal group of Chinese’ in The Routledge Handbook of Systemic Functional Linguistics.

Winnie Chor is an Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Baptist University. Her research focuses on semantic change (from a grammaticalization perspective), discourse analysis, Cantonese linguistics (with a focus on particles), and the stance-taking phenomenon. She is the author of the book Directional Particles in Cantonese: Form, Function, and Grammaticalization (published by John Benjamins). Her articles appear in journals such as Journal of Pragmatics, Journal of Historical Linguistics, Language and Linguistics, and Taiwan Journal of Linguistics. She has also (co-)authored numerous articles in books published by publishers such as John Benjamins, Routledge, Peter Lang, and China Social Sciences Press.