School of Languages and Linguistics - Theses
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ItemMaterial and relational transitivity in Mandarin Chinese( 1997)This thesis presents a Systemic-Functional analysis of aspects of transitivity in Mandarin Chinese, focusing on two major types of clause: material clauses and relational clauses. Material clauses represent actions/events in the material world. Relational clauses express relationships between entities in the most general sense; they include as their prototypical members 'being' or ‘copula' clauses. Chapter 1 provides a brief account of the theoretical framework of SFG. The following four chapters constitute the bulk of the thesis. Chapter 2 provides a detailed description of material clauses. Chapters 3 - 5, deal in turn with three major types of relational clause: attributive, locational and possessive. One of the significant findings of the thesis is that relational clauses encompass a much larger portion of the grammar than is usually believed, and include various 'processes' such as 'giving', 'renting', 'putting', in addition to 'being' (usually classified as material). Hence the notion of transitivity has been refined. The analysis of material and relational transitivity in Mandarin Chinese in this thesis is organised in the form of networks of semantic choices, which characterise clause types and sub-types in terms of role configurations, together with realisation rules which map the semantic representations onto linguistic constructions. An important characteristic of this approach is that syntax and lexicon are integrated into a unified whole - the lexico-grammar. Another is that the model can be used in sentence generation in computational linguistics. Chapter 6 presents conclusion, which highlights the recurrent issues and topics for further investigation.
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ItemStudies in Chinese lexicology: investigations into the Xiang dialect( 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.