School of Languages and Linguistics - Theses
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ItemTopics in colloquial Malay( 1990)This thesis is a description of some common linguistic features of Colloquial Malay, a spoken variety of the Malay language used by native Malay speakers of Malaysia among themselves in everyday unmarked speech situations. While linguistic works and grammars of Standard Malay (or, Bahasa Malaysia), the national language of Malaysia are numerous, there are very few works on the less formal varieties and dialects of Malay spoken in Malaysia. Little importance is given to studying Colloquial Malay and scholarly works on Colloquial Malay are very rare. This thesis seeks to explore and compare various formal properties of Colloquial Malay and Standard Malay and in doing so, to contribute to this largely unexplored area of study in the Malay language. In this work I aim to provide a description of some of the major characteristics of CM in contrast with SM based on a comparison of one sizeable CM text with a comparable SM narrative text. An inductive method is used in analysing inter-and intra-textual shifts in register, that is, shifts in the degree of formality or informality, which correlate with the use of CM-like properties and SM-like properties. From this I build up a description of a set of CM features which can be expected to be characteristic of actual colloquial Malay usage, which will provide a basis for further study. The types of CM features described are diverse and include lexical, morphological and syntactic properties. The lexical features examined include variant phonological forms, colloquial lexical roots, semantic shifts in the colloquial usage of some common roots, code-switching and English loans, the class of emotive, modal and illocutionary particles, and the classes of pronouns and prepositions in Colloquial Malay. Some typical Colloquial Malay expressions, phrases and constructions are dealt with briefly. Several grammatical features are considered: affixation and its frequency in Colloquial Malay relative to Standard Malay; ‘passive’ and causative constructions; the structure of the noun phrase; the Modifier-punya-Head construction, a typical Colloquial Malay construction; verbal auxiliaries; and typical uses of the adverbial saja/(a)je ‘only, just’ in Colloquial Malay. Clause combining strategies, which include subordination, coordination, verb serialization and juxtaposition, are discussed as well.
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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.