36.3 Indicating Destinations for Verbs Involving Movement of Things or People

When we use certain verbs involving movement of a thing or person (e.g., 拎 ling1 ‘to take’, 攞 lo2 ‘to take’, 買 maai5 ‘to buy’), we can add 去 heoi3, 嚟 lai4 and directional verbs to indicate the destination of the movement using the sentence structures below. In grammar, these structures are serial verb constructions.

We can add 去 heoi3 or 嚟 lai4 to indicate the destination of the movement. We choose 去 heoi3 or 嚟 lai4 based on whether the movement is away from or toward our position (See Grammar and Vocabulary 36.2). 去 heoi3 and 嚟 lai4 in this structure function like the English preposition to (as in please take the clothes to the laundry store), but they additionally indicate the direction of the movement.

We can add another verb phrase after the destination to indicate the purpose of the movement. Notice below we don’t add an object in the last verb phrase because the object (衫 saam1 or 啤酒 be1 zau2) is already mentioned in the first verb phrase.

We can also add a directional verb to indicate the destination of the movement.

Again, we can add another verb phrase to indicate the purpose.

We can also use a directional verb and 去 heoi3 or 嚟 lai4 at the same time.

Again, we can add another verb phrase to indicate the purpose.

We sometimes use 去 heoi3, 嚟 lai4 or the directional verb without indicating the destination of the movement explicitly. In this use, we only indicate the direction of the movement. Note that when we only use directional verbs (i.e. without 去 heoi3 or 嚟 lai4), we don’t usually omit the destination.

Although the examples above only include verbs involving movement of a thing, we can use these sentence structures with verbs involving movement of a person too. We will see some examples in later lessons.