An Empirical Study Of The Dichotomous And Trichotomous Demonstrative Pronouns In Dong Language

The issue of the dichotomy(near and far)and trichotomy(near,middle and far)phenomenon of demonstrative pronouns has always been a hot topic in the linguistic field.In the past several years,studies on th is aspect have made great progress,but there are still some inadequacies: 1)The previous research on demonstrative pronouns tended to use the descriptive way of corpus analyzing based on their own senses of language,which lacks of strong empirical evidence;2)Studies of demonstrative pronouns mainly focused on the field of Chinese dialects,for the minority languages,they were received less attention and left far leg behind.The main purposes of the present study is to investigate the usage of demonstrative pronouns of Dong language in Tongdao county,Huaihua city,meanwhile,to provide some empirical evidence for the study of demonstrative pronouns in minority languages.Through the application of an empirical way of study,we mainly focused on two controlled experiments,the first one was the object-controlled experiment and the second was the distance-controlled one.Specifically,the distance between the subject and object and the number of the objects were used as the variables,respectively.We designed ten different settings in the first experiment and twelve in the second.In each of the experiment,the tasks of object indication and place indication were involved.The first task was designed to test the usage of object demonstrative pronouns such as “zhege” “nage”,the second task was set to explore the usage of place demonstrative pronouns like “zheli” “nali” in Dong language.During the process of researching,all the settings were presented at random,and the participants were provided with sample questions and were required to use the Dong language to express the objects and places in different settings.Based on what the previous studies haven 't been involved,the three major research questions in the present study are: 1)Whether the distance affect the selection of demonstrative pronouns in Dong language? 2)Whether the number of objects has influence on the usage of demonstrative pronouns in Dong language? 3)Which system does the demonstrative pronouns of Dong language be long to?After doing a field research,the results showed us the following: 1)When we changed the distance between the subject and the objects,it indicated that different distances lead to different usage of demonstrative pronouns.Distance,as a matter of fact,is one of the most decisive factors that affect the demonstrative pronouns.2)When we changed the number of objects during the experiment two,it can be found that number did not exert much influence on the results,however,distance still actions as the key role.And it refuted the viewpoint put forward by some scholars: the third series is only the substitution or superstition of the former ones.3)Some part of the native Dong language speakers obviously possessed the tri-section system of demonstratives,in the object-indication task,they tend to use “nen33 nai35/ nen33 t?a53 / nen33 lai33 t?a53” to represent the near-medium-far distance,and in the place-indication task,“ge33 nai35/ ge33 t?a53 / ge33 lai33 t?a53”were adopted.While still others belong to the dichotomy system,they would choose the same “ nen33 t?a53” and “ge33 t?a53”(based on the two different tasks)to signify the middle and distal situations.In conclusion,Dong language belongs to the coexistence of the dichotomy and trichotomy system.With respect to the frequency of the third demonstratives in the two tasks,the results showed that it appeared higher in the place indication task than in the object one.It proved what the former scholars have proposed: when there's a coexistence system in a language,the trichotomy phenomenon would be more obvious in the place indication task.