Revisit: the postverbal particle dou2 in Cantonese vs. tet in Sixian Hakka

This paper examines the syntactic properties of the resultative particle dou2 in Cantonese – a Chinese dialect that is only used in spoken but not written contexts, by contrasting it with its closest counterpart in another Chinese dialect Sixian Hakka. Dou2 is incompatible with most other aspect markers, except guo3 occasionally to mark past events. Unlike being a verb suffix like other aspect markers that are often used in Mandarin Chinese (MC), the verb and dou2 can be treated as a potential VV compound form that could have undergone syntactic or lexical compounding (Cheng 1997). Different from Yip & Matthew’s resultative particle ‘accomplishment’ dou (1994: 243) and Sixian Hakka modal tet (Chung 2012: 75), such postverbal particle is addressed as dou2 ‘able’ here to differentiate it from other preverbal modals and postverbal particles in Cantonese and other dialects of Chinese in terms of its inherent nature of allowing epistemic, dynamic and deontic reading at syntactic discourse/pragmatic interface. Dou2 ‘able’ is proposed as an overt realisation of a functional category projected as a phrase, which is tentatively marked as DouP, being dominated by ModP/QuantP/FocusP and dominating VP (between any modal verbs and the verb). It is believed that the V -head will undergo movement to Dou-head in creating a VV compound form or higher up above NegP in a negated construction in allowing a ‘V-Neg-dou2’where the verb precedes the negative morpheme and dou2 ‘able’.