The Comparison Between Xiang Dialects And Wu Dialects Word Order Typology

Recently, the linguists pay more and more attention to the syntactic typology, particularly, the word order typology of the dialects, and dialectists have launched on the research of the type of Wu dialects and the Cantonese, etc. and it has been proved that there is the typology or common linguistic value of dialects in a language. But, based on the theories of the holistic typology, there is some weak in the word order typology, so it is difficult to draw the conclusion to the classification of Chinese and its dialects.The word order typology, building up the sample database, setting the parameters, investigating the implicational universe, and pursuing the harmony and the common universe, is faced with the disharmony of the most languages in the world, the typologists can not figure out it, although they hope to deal with it from the diachronological evolution. In our view, according to the modern prototype category theories and the language system, the disharmony is the manifest of different degree of similarity to the prototype of the word order type, VO or OV.With this improved typological theories, we make a survey of the word order type and the different resemblance of Xiang dialects and Wu dialects. Though setting the VO and topic as the basic parameters, Analyzing the other parameters, for example, the function of pie-or postposition, the type of connection word, nonverb preposition( 把/被/给) and their syntactic structure, the types of possibility complement with object, and so on. Xiang dialects and Wu dialects are the classification of VO language with the topic-prominence, however the tendency of Wu dialects topic- prominence is stronger than Xiang dialects, Xiang dialects is more typical VO language than Wu dialects. they both use the preposition and postposition, but the function of the preposition and postposition in them is different, nonverb preposition(把 被 给) and their syntactic structure is similar, only the ditransitive sentences develop in the different ways. On the comparison sentences, Xiang dialects still use the structure of "standard-outcome of comparison", it is opposite to Wu dialects, in addition, the structure of possibility complement with object is different to be applied, Wu dialects usually make use of the order of the "OV 得/不 C", but "V 得OC/ V 不 OC" is used freely in Xiang dialects. In conclusion, all of the syntactic parameters are in hiumony with their basic type, and they are different degree ofsimilarity to the prototype of the word order type, VO or OV.They are not absolutely opposite in these parameters, which are "common in the difference, difference in the common", for example, the topic marks of them are the same sources but not function in the same way, they both use the sentences with two-object A and B are used in both of them, but develop in different directions. So the common syntactic characters of Wu and Xiang dialects show us Chinese is the untypical VO language. On the other hand, "differences" between them prove their typological value. That is to say, Wu dialects is the typical topic -prominent and weak VO type language, Xiang dialects is the relatively typical VO type and weak topic-prominent language. At the same time, the author testifies the value of topic in the typology. Xiang and Wu dialects and mandarin are the different topic-prominent. other syntactic parameters is in harmony with the topic-prominent. Besides it is important for us to pay attention to the degree of harmony in the word order typology, and is of no consequence to classify the dialects. furthermore cross-dialects on the research can promote the historical linguistics.At last, combining holistic typology with the Chinese syntactic structure, the author tries to discuss the parameters problem in the Chinese and its dialects word order typology. so it will be convenient to study further the Chinese dialects word order typology.