Gratitude expressions with mh-goi and do-jeh in Cantonese : their syntax, lexical semantics and sentence semantics

Abstract

In Cantonese, there are mainly two types of gratitude expressions, mh-goi and do-jeh, that are frequently used in everyday conversation. Although the importance of these gratitude expressions in social interaction is obvious, clear definitions of these words and in-depth explanations on how to use them correctly and idiomatically are lacking in Cantonese textbooks. It is also a hard task for native Cantonese speakers to gener-alize simple rules of use of mh-goi and do-jeh. Moreover, there seems to be no lin-guistic studies on the grammatical and semantic properties of these expressions so far. The present thesis investigates the usages of mh-goi and do-jeh in various utter-ance situations, and subsequently analyzes their similarities and differences on the syntactic, lexical semantic and sentence semantic levels, using the approach of Inte-grational Linguistics (IL). The phenomena related to the use of mh-goi and do-jeh are first discussed informally as a theoretical background, followed by formal syntactic and semantic analyses. The purpose of this thesis is, therefore, two-fold: first, to achieve a fairly comprehensive linguistic analysis of mh-goi and do-jeh in Cantonese, and second, to give both Cantonese teachers and learners of Cantonese a clearer idea of the rules of use of mh-goi and do-jeh based on their syntactic and semantic fea-tures.