ABSTRACT
Existential sentences, introduced by the word yáuh, are important to idiomatic Cantonese, yáuh essentially means 'have' or 'there is/there are' but often does not correspond to anything in English. For example, in many cases yáuh is required to introduce an indefinite noun phrase as the subject of a sentence, due to the constraint that subjects should be definite (see 4.2.5, 15.5). The negative counterpart móuh 'there isn't/there aren't' behaves in a parallel fashion: essentially all those structures which occur with yáuh also occur with móuh (15.4). The corresponding A-not-A question form, yáuh-móuh, is used to form existential questions (17.1.5).
