Investigating Of Pre-verbal Dao And Sentence-final Dao Of Chenxi Dialect In Hunan

In terms of the way languages use to express temporal meaning, most of Indo-European languages use verbal inflection to mark tense. Taking English for example, it uses-ed to mark past tense. Instead, most Sino-Tibetan languages lack of explicit morphologies, such as Mandarin Chinese, temporal meaning in it is expressed by aspect markers, temporal adverbials, contexts and so on.In this thesis, we aim to investigate the semantic interpretation and syntactic distribution of daos in Chenxi. We observe that there are two different usages of dao in Chenxi dialect: in one case it is used before a verb, and in another case it is used at the end of a sentence. For convenience, we name the one which precedes the verb, dao₁, and the one stands at the sentence-final, dao₂. The sentence with dao₁ means the action happened in the past. The sentence with dao₂ indicates that the action or state happened or existed in the past, which has stopped at the speech time. Furthermore, there are other some differences between them. Firstly, dao₁ only can only exist in the sentence with dynamic non-telic verbs, but it cannot be used with telic and state verbs. Instead; dao₂ can be used with any types of verb. Besides, the sentence with dao₂ indicates an affirmative mood. In addition, the two daos can co-occur in sentences with dynamic verb to indicate event happened in the past with a more affirmative mood.Through the study, we have found that both the two daos are associated with past tense interpretation. We argue that dao₁ can be regarded as a locative non-coincidence predicate indicating that the locus of the event does not coinc ide with that of the utterance. Namely, the event location and the utterance location is not in the same place, hence produces [+past] reading. As for dao₂, we hold that it is an operator relating to past tense. It is used to bind the variables in T. The sentence gets past tense interpretation.In this thesis, we also have an analysis of qu in qu+VP in Mandarin Chinese. We find that dao₂ and qu can both be regarded as locative non-coincidence predicates indicating that the locus of the event does not coinc ide with that of the utterance, hence produces [+past] reading. The analysis of qu indicates that using locative predicate to express time meaning of dao₁ in Chenxi dialect is not an isolated phenomenon.