Which helps to support the idea that "ka-liau" might indeed be an elided form of "kau-liau", with "liau" being a full verb.
Not sure if this applies here, but kàu regularly elides to kà in Formosan Hoklo. In a lot of contexts, unelided kàu sounds weird to me and might even be incorrect.
I've never heard you speak, but if you are using a Taiwanese accent to pronounce your words, then I guess the difference between 'kā-liáu' and 'kà-liáu' will be much more extreme than in PGHK, and it is therefore more important that you know whether it is 3 or 1 in the first syllable.
People who hear me speak usually think I'm from somewhere else. TWnese usually think I have a Malayan sound, Malayans think I'm from Taiwan or some other island in Nusantara, and Hokkienese think I'm from Kwongtung.
Now, I think the tone band in TWnese Hoklo (and other dialects too, inc. Amoy) is actually pretty narrow, and subjectively low. My impression of PgHK is that it goes pretty high. Then again, I still can't tell who's a native spkr vs who's speaking it with a Teochew or Canto lilt. All I know is that I always have to remind myself to squash my tone band when I speak Hoklo. In Amoy and TW, it can be the difference btw people switching to Mandarin on me or not! Day and night.
This sort of thing gives me a headache too, so I avoid it by sticking firmly to one variety and learning and using only the words from that variety in the context of that variety. I've been a bit slow to realise, but Amhoanna, is it right to say that you are aiming at learning a larger inclusive unified sort of Hokkien that includes all the riches of the different varieties? That's a much better ambition i think than a narrow standard that excludes anything not from Amoy, as it makes everyone happy.
Well, Ah-bin, U're sticking to one dialect (actually two) for the sake of mastering it and describing it. That's probably necessary. Yeah, I do subscribe to a unified theory of Hokkien-Teochew! In TW and Amoy I feel constrained to use the localized Hoklo that I've learned. I always feel set free in MY and even SG to talk Hoklo any damn way I see fit. I'm driven by aesthetic urges and by ideology as well. I won't argue with Freud here. The Hoklo urge is tied to the sex drive for me.
For me, no dialect of Hoklo is less sexy than TWnese, with its clipped cadences, Japanese influences e.g. overuse of Tng 唐 literary readings and lack of female spkrs of childbearing age.
If some people ever read this and get offended, good! Things didn't have to be this way.