A Study On The Potential V-C Construction In The Yue Dialects

This thesis analyses the syntactic and semantic feature of the potential verb-complement construction in the Yue dialects, and takes Guangzhou Cantonese for example to demonstrate the development of the potential V-C construction through comparing the written materials of the Yue dialects in the late Qing Dynasty and the oral materials of the contemporary Guangzhou Cantonese, and through comparing the different expressions among the young adulthood, middle age, and old age. The results of the comparisons are as follows:(1) In contemporary Guangzhou Cantonese, the older, native patterns, namely, the "type Neg-V" and the "type O-C", have faded away to some extent while the latter patterns from Mandarin, namely the "type V-Neg" and the "type C-O", have further developed by way of breaking away from certain limitations.(2) The potential V-C construction in the Yue dialects keeps stable syntactic feature of succinctness and terseness.(3) The semantic category of the potential V-C construction with the mark t(?)k 得has been restricted to the potential subcategory while the potential V-C construction with the mark tou 倒 and the potential modal auxiliaries share some semantic functions of the potential V-C construction with the mark t(?)k...