A Study On Demonstrative Pronouns In Zhuang Language

The dissertation focuses on the demonstrative pronoun system of Weiluo dialect of Zhuang, the author’s native language, a minority language of Funing County in Yunnan Province. A detailed description of the category, the grammar position, the grammatical meaning, the pragmatic meaning, the source and the grammatical function of Weiluo dialect’s demonstrative pronoun will be made. The dissertation is composed of five chapters.The prolegomena explicates the aim and significance of the research, analyzes on the research status of Tai languages’demonstrative pronoun, introduces the research background, the theoretical methods adopted, the corpus sources and the innovation of the article, makes a brief introduction to Weiluo dialect of Zhuang.The first chapter describes the demonstrative pronoun system of Weiluo dialect of Zhuang, which is a special "three-part" person-oriented system. The demonstrative pronoun in Weiluo dialect can indicate near, middle and far place according to the participants on location. We also make a detailed description of it from four perspectives:position and location, person or thing, time, property degree or motion manner. Furthermore, we will introduce two other demonstrative pronouns "shang" and "xia", that evolved into demonstrative pronouns from localizers.The second chapter analyzes the grammar position, the grammatical meaning and the pragmatic meaning of the demonstrative pronoun in Weiluo dialect, and especially emphasize particularly on the emptiness to the grammatical meaning. We hold opinion that the grammatical function of the demonstrative pronoun in Weiluo dialect of Zhuang are generally subject or object, and they are used after nouns or quantifiers more often, in a few cases they are used after the second personal pronouns, kinship terms or personal names. We probe into the emptiness to the grammatical meaning and introduce the grammatical function of the demonstrative pronoun in Weiluo dialect of Zhuang in detail.The third chapter analyzes the source of the demonstrative pronoun of Weiluo dialect by comparing Weiluo dialect’demonstrative pronoun with other dialects of Zhuang’s, and we find that the phonetic forms of Weiluo dialect’ demonstrative pronoun are different from the rest. So are the grammar and the pragmatic maxims. We speculate that the source of the demonstrative pronoun of Weiluo dialect is different from other dialects of Zhuang.The fourth chapter summarizes the conclusions of the research and the deficiencies.