New Language Resources for Cantonese Linguistics Research:

A Linguistic Corpus of Mid-20th Century Hong Kong Cantonese

Andy C. ChinThe Hong Kong Institute of Education

andychin@ied.edu.hk

PNC2013Kyoto UniversityDecember 10-11 2013

Outline

• Why “Cantonese”?• Research on early Cantonese (19th - mid-

20th C) – Diachronic development• The corpus

– Source of data– Demonstration of search engine

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Cantonese in Hong Kong

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Cantonese

• One of the dialects of the Chinese language family

• In spite of being a dialect, Cantonese serves as a lingua franca in Hong Kong, Macau and most part of Guangdong Province of China

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Use of Cantonese

“Cantonese” in early Hong Kong

• A fishing village• Population: 1851: ~33,000

– Four major ethnic groups:• Guangfu 廣府 ( 本地 )• Danjia 蛋家 (seafaring people)• Hakka 客家• Min 閩語 ( 鶴佬 / 潮州 )• Their languages are mutually unintelligible

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Given the long history of Cantonese in HK

• We are interested in understanding its development in the past 200 years

• Are there any differences between early Cantonese and modern Cantonese?

• How can we capture these differences?

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Diachronic studies of Cantonese

• Two approaches

– Apparent time approach– Real time approach

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Apparent time approach

• age-stratified variation in a linguistic form is often indicative of a change in progress

– 75 vs. 50 vs. 25 y/o changes over 50 years– language of 200 years ago?– language change: Can we assume a speaker still

speak the language of his time?• if two speakers show no difference with

respect to a linguistic feature, does it mean that there has been no change?

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Real time approach

• samples the population over an extended period of time – longitudinal study

• To collect data produced in the period concerned

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Limitations on Research in Cantonese

• Cantonese is a vernacular language

• Spoken data is needed

• Any records of Cantonese of early 19th-C?

- spoken data vs. written records

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With these early materials,

• We are able to reconstruct the early stage of the Cantonese language (about 200 years ago)

• Some of the linguistic features are very different from those in modern Cantonese

Previous research on Cantonese

Neutral Qs

Directional complements

Aspect markers

demonstratives

phonology

Verb complement

…

Comparative construction

Lexicon (sociolinguistics)

Dative verb GIVE

Sentence final particles

Grammar of the late Qing period

…

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Furthermore,

• Some linguistic changes took place/completed around the mid-20th century– Dative marker: 過 畀 ( 送本書過 /畀佢 )– Neutral Q ：你去睇戲唔呀 你去唔去睇戲呀– …

• New and old features might co-exist in mid-20th C

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Morrison (1828)

2013Chao (1947)

120 years

~66 years

Existing Cantonese corpora

1. The Hong Kong Cantonese Child Language Corpus

2. The Hong Kong Bilingual Child Language Corpus

3. Hong Kong Cantonese Corpus

4. The Hong Kong Cantonese Adult Language Corpus

5. 19th Century Cantonese Corpus

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Source of corpus data

– Real time vs. 　 Apparent time

– Naturally occurring data

– HK Cantonese movies （ 粵語長片）

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http://corpus.ied.edu.hk/hkcc/

HK Movie Industry in mid-20th C.

Year 　 No. of Cantonese movies No. of PTH movies1952 - 1955 627 　　 2221956 - 1960 963 　　 3141961 - 1965 928 　　 2061966 - 1970 361 　　 286Total 2879 1028

Source of data ： Chung (2004:177)19

About the corpus

• 21 movies have been transcribed with Chinese characters: ~200k characters

• Word segmentation

• search engine (14 movies, since Apr 2012)– http://corpus.ied.edu.hk/hkcc/– 350+ registered users

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Search criteria

• Characters or words (segmented units)• Cantonese pronunciation

• Movie names• Names of speakers• Gender of speakers• …

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契爺艷史 (1952)

• Yes-No question• VP-Neg: 你位千金有讀書冇呀？• V-Neg-VO: 呢道係咪有位黃小姐？

• Dative marker• 重要畀錢過人？• 咪可以快啲還清啲債畀人？

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Some challenges

• Quality of speech• Overlap of speech• Representations of colloquial vocabulary• Parts-of-speech: How many types?• Discourse features• …

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Acknowledgments

• ECS research grants, RGC:– Linguistic Analysis of Mid-20th Century Hong Kong

Cantonese by Constructing an Annotated Spoken Corpus (2013/2015)

• HKIEd Internal Research Grants:– RG41/2010-2011: Spoken Corpus Construction and

Linguistic Analysis of Mid-20th Century Cantonese– RG62/12-13R: A Preliminary Linguistic Analysis of

Mid-20th Century Cantonese from a Corpus-based Approach

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Demonstration

• http://corpus.ied.edu.hk/hkcc/

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