Intermediate Cantonese - A Grammar and Workbook, 2nd Edition

Description

Intermediate Cantonese is designed for learners who have achieved basic proficiency and wish to progress to more complex language.

Each of the 25 units combines clear, concise grammar explanations with communicatively oriented exercises to help build confidence and fluency.

Features include:

Many authentic examples from contemporary media, including films, advertising, songs and soap operas
Clear differentiation between colloquial and more formal speech registers
Up-to-date analysis of contemporary Cantonese as spoken in Hong Kong.
Suitable for independent learners and students on taught courses, Intermediate Cantonese, together with its sister volume, Basic Cantonese, forms a structured course of the essentials of Cantonese grammar.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Consonants and vowels
2 Tone contours
3 Changed tones
4 Reduplication
5 Word formation
6 Verb-object compounds
7 Adjectives and stative verbs
8 Classifiers revisited
9 Topic and focus
10 Using jēung
11 Serial verbs
12 Aspect markers
13 Comparisons
14 Resultative and causative sentences with dou
15 Quantification
16 Negative sentences
17 Questions and answers
18 Relative clauses
19 Subordinate clauses
20 Conditional sentences
21 Reported speech
22 Cantonese speech conventions
23 Particles and interjections
24 Colloquial syntax
25 Code-mixing and loanwords
Key to exercises
Glossary of grammatical terms

About the Authors

Virginia Yip is Professor at the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Stephen Matthews is Professor at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Hong Kong.

They are the authors of Basic Cantonese: A Grammar and Workbook (2000), Cantonese: A Comprehensive Grammar (1994, 2nd edition 2011), The Bilingual Child: Early Development and Language Contact (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and co-directors of the Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre.