Cantonese the lingua franca of Hong Kong and its neighboring province has an unusually rich
repertoire of verbal particles. This volume significantly augments the academic literature on
their semantics focusing on three affixal quantifiers -saai -hoi and -maai. The author shows
how these verbal suffixes display a unique interplay of syntax and semantics: used in a
sentence with no focus they quantify items flexibly according to an accessibility hierarchy
with focus focus comes into effect after syntactic selection. This fresh and compelling
perspective in the study of particles and quantification is the first in-depth analysis of
Cantonese verbal suffixes. It compares the language's affixal quantification to the alternative
determiner and adverbial quantifiers. The book's syntax-semantics mapping geography deploys
both descriptive and theoretical approaches making it an essential resource for researchers
studying the nexus of syntax and semantics as well as Cantonese itself.
