Than Workers Gelao Language Vocabulary Study

This dissertation focuses on the vocabulary of Bigong local dialect of the Gelao Language belonging to Geyang branch of Zhuang-Dong language subgroup of Han-Tibetan language family. It segments the multi-syllable words collected in the fieldwork and gets the syllables separated by means of lexicologically segmenting verbal expressions into terms and morphemes, trying to find out the semantic meaning and determine the morphemes so that all the words and phrases collected are exhaustively described. The structural or semantic change of the today's words and phrases is the consequence of their evolution happening yesterday. Synchronic lexical structures and semantic distribution provide clues for tracing historical evolution. In a perspective of typology, this paper studies the word-building and structural characters and the phonetic and semantic distribution of the Gelao Language vocabulary and proves the structural specialty, relationship of pronunciation and semantics and the regular patterns of the semantic evolution possessed by the dialect vocabulary of the Gelao Language.The dissertation includes:Chapterâ… Introduction, which presents the object, contents, significance and methodology of the research, summarizes the status quo of the related research and states the source of the linguistic data.Chapterâ…¡The Overview of the Social Culture and the Language Feature, which introduces the features of the social culture of the Gelao people and the use of the Bigong-Gelao Language, including the phonetic and grammatical features of the initials, finals, tones and syllables.Chapterâ…¢The Relationship of Pronunciation of the Words First, the standards of the words are discussed in four dimensions, i.e. phonetic form, structural form, meaning and integral function. Second, the overall distribution of the all types of syllable words is calculated and so is the semantic distribution of the word's number of syllables. Third, the feature of the homophones is analyzed and its causes probed into. Fourth, three ways of Chinese-borrowing words are divided into: integrally borrowing, semi-borrowing integration and homophone-borrowing interpretation, the last of which is mainly analyzed.Chapterâ…£The Structural Feature of the Words By segmenting the word into morpheme(yusu) and morpheme (cisu), this paper investigates the word-root morpheme and affix morpheme and their wordbuilding capacity and wordbuilding way of the Bigong Gelao Language, analyzes the formation of the simple word and compound and calculates their distribution, studies the morphological word formation and compound formation of the Bigong Gelao Language, and discusses the types of overlap, phonetic feature, semantic feature and grammatical function of the overlap form of the Gelao adjectives.Chapter V The Relationship of Semantic Aggregation The causes of a large number of eloquent synonyms and the semantic difference of the near-synonyms are analyzed in several ways. Just as the way of changing the positive word into the negative one by adding a negative morpheme is one of the most important way of the negative word formation, many of the Bigong-Gelao opposite relationship words are corresponded by words and phrases according to the formation of opposite meaning. Based on the difference of the semantic types, the hyponymy-relation words are sorted with detail in 14 aspects and integral-meaning and part-meaning words in 7 aspects. So do the causes of allolex of the Bigong-Gelao Language.Chapter VI The Semantic Evolution of the Morpheme The semantic evolution of the Gelao words are analyzed in terms of notional and functional morphemes, in which the process of the evolution of "qa55", "pu55","pha13","le31" "la31","ma55" from notion to function and the semantic range of the word compounded with them are emphasized.The Gelao Language draws more and more attention of the linguistic field due to its importance in Dongtai Subgroup as well as in the whole language family. But for some reasons the Gelao Language, which has been endangered, is used by a decreasing number of the local people. Therefore, it is extraordinarily pressed and important to describe and study it. It's a pity that the research on it is very insufficient and the only existing research is no more than primary historical comparison or overbroad description. There are few studies analyzing and expounding in detail and there are still fewer studying it systematically. So it extremely significant to do a special study on the Bigong-Gelao vocabulary.This dissertation is significant in five aspects:1. to help enhance the awareness of the synchronic status of the Gelao Language; 2. to help promote the comparison study of the different dialects of the Gelao Language and provide enough language stuff and proofs for those who will observe and do research on ethnic minority languages; 3. to contribute to the deep research on Han-Tibetan language family, especially the typological study on the lexical comparison, lexical structure,semantic evolution of the Zhuang-Dong Language Subgroup vocabulary; 4. to supply some valuable references for those who will study the relationship of the Gelao Language and Chinese; 5. to support the studies on the history, culture as well as the relevant disciplinary of the Gelao people.