Acquisition of Cantonese syntax has received relatively little attention up till now. The first known work is Li's (1968) thesis on the development of her little sister's syntax in Cantonese from the age of 1;6 to 2;6 in the context of Malaysia. The data currently available on the early acquisition of Cantonese consist of longitudinal observations (Leung, 1996; Lee et al., 1996); some cross-sectional elicitation studies of the comprehension or production of forms such as locative phrases (Cheung, 1991a) and wh-words (A. Cheung & Lee, 1996); and a few experimental studies that rely on grammaticality judgments and revisions (Tsang & Stokes, 2001), and on uses of novel verbs to elicit grammatical constructions (Cheung & Brooks, 2002).

In this chapter we focus on children's development of expressions for talking about actions and results. We first provide a general characterization of those Cantonese structures relevant to our discussion of the acquisition studies.

General characterization of Cantonese

Cantonese, in its broad sense, refers to a family of related Chinese dialects spoken in Hong Kong, Macau, the province of Guangdong, the southern region of the province of Guangxi, and many ethnic Chinese communities around the world. In this broad sense, there are over 70 million Cantonese speakers worldwide (Grimes, 2000). The term Cantonese is also used to refer specifically to the varieties of Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong and Guangzhou (the city of Canton).