Intermediate Cantonese

Intermediate Cantonese is designed for learners who have achieved basic proficiency and wish to progress to more complex language. Each of the 25 units combines clear, concise grammar explanations with communicatively oriented exercises to help build confidence and fluency. Features include: - Many authentic examples from contemporary media, including films, advertising, songs and soap operas - Clear differentiation between colloquial and more formal speech registers - Up-to-date analysis of contemporary Cantonese as spoken in Hong Kong. Suitable for independent learners and students on taught courses, Intermediate Cantonese, together with its sister volume, Basic Cantonese, forms a structured course of the essentials of Cantonese grammar.

Virginia Yip is Professor at the Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Stephen Matthews is Professor at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Hong Kong. They are the authors of Basic Cantonese: A Grammar and Workbook (2000), Cantonese: A Comprehensive Grammar (1994, 2nd edition 2011), The Bilingual Child: Early Development and Language Contact (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and co-directors of the Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre.

Acknowledgements Introduction 1 Consonants and vowels 2 Tone contours 3 Changed tones 4 Reduplication 5 Word formation 6 Verb-object compounds 7 Adjectives and stative verbs 8 Classifiers revisited 9 Topic and focus 10 Using jeung 11 Serial verbs 12 Aspect markers 13 Comparisons 14 Resultative and causative sentences with dou 15 Quantification 16 Negative sentences 17 Questions and answers 18 Relative clauses 19 Subordinate clauses 20 Conditional sentences 21 Reported speech 22 Cantonese speech conventions 23 Particles and interjections 24 Colloquial syntax 25 Code-mixing and loanwords Key to exercises Glossary of grammatical terms Index