Immediate anteriority construction in Cantonese

Abstract

This study explores the immediate anteriority (“IMANTE”) construction in Cantonese, in which two events form an “as soon as” relationship. By collecting examples from corpora, three types of IMANTE construction are categorized, based on the subordinate events: (i) achievement, (ii) completion point of a durational event, and (iii) inchoative point of a durational event. This study argues that (iii) is the default usage of a subordinate event when it is durational because it is unmarked and historically emerged earlier than (ii). Second, (iii) is seemingly a defining property of IMANTE besides “zero-time interval between two events”.