Grammatical diversity across the Yue dialects

Abstract

There is a general belief that Yue constitutes a highly uniform dialect group, with its members sharing a good number of structures and lexica with the regional prestige dialect, Cantonese. Based on our first hand data collected from the field, this paper * describes the lesser known grammatical diversity across the Yue dialects, which can be illustrated by the different uses of the following features: (a) ideophonic suffixes; (b) diminutive suffixes and tone sandhi; (c) perfective aspect markers and their position in the VP, and (d) neutral question forms. The survey includes nine dialects from different subgroups, most of which are spoken far away from the Pearl River Delta where Cantonese dominates. Our study reveals that while Cantonese has obvious influence over other members of Yue, the grammatical diversity across Yue cannot simply be overlooked.