Ebook: A Corpus of Cantonese Ideophones

Publisher: The University of Hong Kong
Publication date: 2008
Number of pages: 63
Language:English/CantoneseA Corpus of Cantonese Ideophones
Words are the seeds of syntax, and word classes like verbs and nouns project their peculiar grammatical features. An understanding of the grammatical structure of a language therefore subsumes an understanding of the various word classes in that language. Yet it is often challenging
to neatly group all words of a language into classes. Ideophones typify such features of wordhood
and lexicality in grammar (Voeltz and Kilian-Hatz 2001). However, there is considerable controversy as to whether they constitute a coherent class or are indeed distributed across many word classes. This corpus is a database of potential ideophones in Cantonese, elicited from a group of native Cantonese1 speakers in Hong Kong.