Taiwanese Hokkien/Southern Min

The Southern Min languages, or Min Nan, are a family of Chinese languages spoken in southern Fujian, in Taiwan (where it is known as Taiwanese) and in Southeast Asia (known as Hokkien in Singapore and Malaysia). Both Taiwan Southern Min (TSM) and Mandarin (MD) feature the basic SVO order, while allowing topicalization and focalization. Just like MD, TSM also employs various sentence-final particles for marking questions and other discourse functions. Despite the similarities, TSM is generally characterized to be more topic-prominent and analytic compared to MD. The various sections of this chapter flesh out these descriptive characterizations and discuss what theoretical implications they may have. The five topics include word order, aspect/phase markers, causative/passive/unaccusative sentences, negative question particles, and nominal domains.