Rethinking postverbal ‘acquire’ and related constructions in Cantonese

Abstract

Abstract This paper revisits a well-established areal phenomenon in Mainland Southeast Asia and Northern Europe involving an element, ACQ(UIRE), that functions as a lexical verb meaning ‘to get or acquire’ and appears, as a functional item, in numerous seemingly unrelated constructions such as modal constructions, resultatives, descriptive complementation, and focus constructions. This paper presents a generative framework for the postverbal ACQ-structures in Hong Kong Cantonese involving the marker dak1 . The proposed framework takes into account four readings of postverbal ACQ-sentences, namely potential, permission, descriptive, and focus, and argues that all postverbal ACQ-structures in Cantonese share the same basic configuration in which the ACQ heads a v P-internal ModP which expresses possibility modality and selects a small clause XP. The postverbal ACQ takes an AspP as complement which indicates the (non-)realization of the projected endpoint. The interpretational difference and other structural variations are boiled down to the three parameters realized in featural terms as: [±Realised] on Asp 0 , [±Possibility] and [±Deontic] on Mod 0 . The analysis also provides an explanation for several long-standing issues, including the verb-copying phenomenon, the co-occurrence of dak1 with the modal auxiliary ho2ji5 , the distribution of the A-not-A form and negation, and the across-the-board aspectual incompatibility in postverbal ACQ-structures. The parametric framework demonstrates how apparently unrelated ACQ-constructions are closely connected with each other and provide a testable model to account for cross-linguistic variation found in other ACQ languages.