School of Languages and Linguistics - Theses

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    Studies in Chinese lexicology: investigations into the Xiang dialect
    WU, YUNJI ( 1992)
    Any speaker of a non-standard Chinese dialect has some familiarity with a number of written and spoken varieties of the Chinese language, both dialectal and standard. The knowledge of these varieties, and of relationships between them, is an essential characteristic of a dialect speaker's linguistic competence in Chinese, and the complexity of this knowledge presents one of the greatest difficulties for the linguist in charting the synchronic structures and diachronic development of Chinese. The challenge begins for the native speaker, who must negotiate their way through this linguistic milieu. It extends to and dominates the work of contemporary Chinese dialectologists, the products of whose research cannot be properly understood unless one has a clear grasp of both the Chinese dialect speaker's complex linguistic world, and also the traditional means by which Chinese researchers have developed to represent this world. This thesis attempts to tackle this challenge through a discussion of problems concerning the status and organization of the Changsha dialect. The main focus is upon the formative: the monosyllabic morpheme, which, from the perspective of the Chinese speaker, is the fundamental unit in word formation. The arrangement and rearrangement of phonological-semantic relationships between formatives within and across dialects will be explored through a discussion of types of local words (Chapter 3), interactions between different varieties, both written and spoken" standard and local (Chapter 4), and the problem of representation of local words in characters (Chapter 5). Chapters 1 and 2 provide a general introduction to these issues, and also to the linguistic situation of Hunan, the province of which Changsha is the capital.