The Non-deictic Use of Demonstratives in Conversations and Interpreted Speeches in Contemporary Hong Kong Cantonese

The Non-deictic Use of Demonstratives in Conversations and Interpreted Speeches in Contemporary Hong Kong Cantonese Oi Yee Kwong Department of Translation The Chinese University of Hong Kong Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong oykwong@arts.cuhk.edu.hk Abstract This study aims at attesting and assessing the usage and functional shift of demonstratives in contemporary Hong Kong Cantonese. Preliminary results from a corpus-based comparison show that while demonstratives are still predominantly used for their deictic and anaphoric functions in face-to-face conversations, an obvious deviation is observed in public discussions and interpreted speeches, particularly for the distal demonstrative, which is used far more often in a way similar to pause fillers in linguistic planning and speech production. Potential factors underlying the phenomenon and implications on language teaching and interpreter training are discussed. 1 Introduction Demonstratives in a language, typically “this” and “that” as in English, are supposed to be used for deictic purposes conventionally. For Hong Kong Cantonese, however, it is observed at least in some speech situations that demonstratives tend to exhibit more non-deictic usages, unlike the normal deictic and anaphoric functions specified in most Cantonese grammars. This study aims at attesting this phenomenon with a corpus-based approach and further investigating the functional changes of demonstratives with respect to different speech situations. In particular, we compare the use of demonstratives in three Hong Kong Cantonese corpora of spontaneous speech, for two types of conversations and interpreted speeches. In Section 2, we review the use of Cantonese demonstratives as described in textbook grammars and observed in real life. Section 3 explains our research questions, and the approach and materials used for their investigation in this study. Section 4 presents the corpus analysis, further discussed in Section 5, followed by a conclusion with future directions in Section 6. 2 Demonstratives in Cantonese The two demonstratives in Cantonese are the proximal 呢 1 li1 and the distal 嗰 go2, generally corresponding to “this” and “that” in English, and 這 zhè and 那 nà in Mandarin, respectively. 2.1 Conventional Usages Normally demonstratives in Cantonese are used for deictic functions, when combined with the appropriate classifiers and nouns, and with numerals as necessary to indicate singular or plural forms (Matthews and Yip, 2011), as in (1). (1) a. 呢 份 報告 li1 fan6 bou3gou3 this CL report ‘this report’ b. 嗰 兩 個 重點 go2 loeng5 go3 zung6dim2 that two CL main-point ‘those two main points’ Syntactically, demonstrative phrases may appear as sentential subjects or objects, as prenominal modifiers, in possessive constructions, relative clauses, and appositions, just as diversely as other noun phrases in general. Within a discourse, when 1 The proximal demonstrative is often transcribed as 呢 or 哩, with pronunciation variants including li1, lei1, ni1 and nei1, and occasionally as 依 ji1. In this paper, it is represented uniformly as 呢 li1, unless otherwise quoted from specific corpus data with a different transcription. PACLIC 32 313 32nd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation Hong Kong, 1-3 December 2018 Copyright 2018 by the author demonstratives are used, they …

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