Ka-Fai Yip publishes paper on Cantonese inner aspect

Ka-Fai Yip’s (PhD candidate, 5th year) paper “Inner aspect in Cantonese” is published in the inaugural issue of FLaP FIRST. 

The paper provides the first systematic study on the structural properties of inner aspect in Cantonese. In total 14 postverbal inner aspectual elements have been identified (e.g., completive jyun in sik-jyun ‘finish eating’). It is shown that they occupy a middle position: above resultative verbal complements (e.g., baau ‘full’ in sik-baau ‘eat and become full’), but below outer aspectual elements (e.g., perfective -zo in sik-zo ‘ate’). Syntactically, they are lower than vP but may be either higher or lower than VP. Furthermore, while some of them are phase complements, some others have already become or on their way to becoming verbal suffixes.