THE PLACEMENT OF LOCATIVE PREPOSITIONAL PHRASES INCANTONESE: PROCESSING AND ICONICITY

Abstract

Cantonese is unusual as a VO language in having [PP V] as the dominant order instead of [V PP]. Dryer (1992) found that VO order correlates strongly with [V PP] order. Hawkins (1994) offered an explanation in arguing that VO language and [V [PP P NP]] order can be processed with optimal processing efficiency. This paper investigates the reasons why Cantonese still employs the [PP V] order despite its lower processing efficiency. While [[PP P NP] V] order in Cantonese conforms to iconicity, the inefficiency of the [[PP P NP] V] order is circumvented due to the availability of the topic PP construction, which is shown to have higher processing efficiency when compared to [[PP P NP] V] by Hawkins’ (1994) metric of Early Immediate Constituents (EIC). Corpus findings show that the heavier the PP, the larger the percentage appearing in topic position. As I will argue, the topic PP construction which exhibits both iconicity and processing efficiency shows that the two seemingly competing functional motivations, iconicity and processing are compatible with each other.

Keywords

• Cantonese
• prepositional phrase
• word order
• topic
• iconicity
• processing efficiency