Focus Manifestation in Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese

"One prominent function of natural language is to convey information, and one peculiarity is that it does not do so randomly, but in a structured way, with information structuring formally recognized to be a component of grammar. Among all information structuring notions, focus is one primitive needed to account for all phenomena. Focus Manifestation in Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese: A Comparative Perspective aims to examine from a semantic perspective how syntactic structures and focus adverbs in Mandarin Chinese and semantic particles in Cantonese, with particular focus given to co-occurrence of adverbs, verbal suffixes and sentence-final particles, conspire to encode focus structures and determine focus manifestation in Chinese"--