A Lexical Study Of The Min Dialect In Northern Hainan

Hainan Min dialect (locally named"Hainan Vernacular") is now the most prominent Chinese dialect in Hainan, prevailing in the most area and covering about 80% of the population on the island. Originated from the Fujian Min dialect, Hainan Min (hereafter referred to as"HNM"as necessary) has undergone articulate changes over the past hundreds of years since it first set foot on the island in the Song dynasty. Nowadays, it is hard for both the dialects to communicate to each other freely.What peculiarities has Hainan Min developed on its own? What common features does it still share with the source dialect? Or in other words, how far has it departed from the Fujian Min? These questions have fallen into concerns of the people who take a hand in the Hainan Min studies.This research takes the northern Hainan Min (hereafter referred to as"northern HNM"as necessary) as the object of study, because the northern area is believed to be the"cradle"of today's Hainan Min dialect.The dissertation is made up of six chapters. Chapter I,"General Introduction", makes a brief survey on the history of Hainan, particularly on the forming and development of Hainan Min dialect. Chapter II,"A Phonemic Description of Hainan Min", is a necessary preparation for the lexical study of the dialect.Chapters III to VI comprise the main contents of this study. Chapter III,"The Feature Words of the Northern Hainan Min"is unfolded around two axis of comparison and extraction. By comparing the northern HNM vocabulary with the"200 feature words of the Min"proposed by Profess Li Rulong of Xiamen University in China, it is discovered that cognate words are nearly up to 85% of the total, and those of the same sense and reference also precede half of the percentage, which proves that the northern HNM still follows a clear generic line of the Min Dialect. On the axis of extraction, 72 peculiar feature words are worked out, which stand in characteristics of the words and expressions of the northern HNM. Chapter IV,"The Vocabulary Features of the northern HNM (A)", engages in a detailed discussion of the characteristics of the vocabulary from the viewpoints of word frequency, etymology, and language culture, to the effect of the following: 1) highly-centralized effective morphemes, which points to a preference of simplicity in word making; 2) sporadic layout of ethnic-sourced morphemes with a weakening sense of meaning; 3) proliferation of"synonymous reading"in the northern HNM caused by the expansion of dialectal morphenes; 4) Min iconicity, peculiarity, and borrowing from Lingao language (a subbranch of Zhuang-Dong ethnic language, which came to Hainan Island much earlier than Han language) all exist in the ways of addressing family members and relatives; and 5) strong inert of a"monosyllabic complex", which is compliant with the conservative nature of a vocabulary. Chapter V,"The Vocabulary Features of the northern HNM (B)"deals on the structure, formalization, and close-ended type parts of speech.The structural discussion shows that the majority of the"inverted words"in the northern HNM are structurally inverted, that morpheme repetition words imply a weighing up in meaning, and that symmetrical generic instances of two- or four-syllable patterns are found in the northern HNM.An analysis the content words formalization in the northern HNM shows a three phases of full formalization, half formalization and co-existents.As for the close-ended type of parts of speech, pronouns, quantifiers, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and auxiliaries of the northern HNM are discussed in detail, with the results of 1) Great iconicity is shared with the Min in Xiamen, Chaozhou and Leizhou, either in the root form or as variation from the same origin, and the iconicity is greater southwards from Xiamen; 2) many noun quantifiers have the deictic functions; 3) only the word"无( 21)"is used as the negator; 4) the adverbial marker"De('地')"of the Chinese Mandarin is realized in three forms of"其(n 21)","著(○213)"and"作( 55)"; 5) aspect words are much more mature and active than tense words; 6) in the auxiliary words of moods,"无( 21)"is stepping into use for the ending of a general question,"些( 213)"is suspiciously traced far back to the ancient use of"Chu Xue"(a typical sentence-ending auxiliary peculiar to the Chu Kindom vernacular in ancient China), and some special words are found as distinct to each of the four places in the northern HNM.Chapter VI,"A Quantitative Study of the northern HNM", engages in a quantitative comparison between Xiamen Min and the northern HNM in the respects of vernacular words, effective morphemes, feature words, words of addressing relatives, and words of close-ended parts of speech, the result of which shows the following:1) the figures of the comparison pairs involving Fucheng vernacular are all high, reflecting the strong power of influence of Fucheng vernacular as being located in the capital city of the province;2) those involving Wancheng vernacular are the lowest, which explains why Wancheng vernacular has not been relegated to either the"Wen-Qiong"section or the"Hai-Fu"section in the northern area of Hainan;3) Jiaji vernacular is closest to both Fucheng and Wencheng vernaculars, showing an open and adaptive inclination in nature; and4) in the comparisons with Xiamen Min, Fucheng vernacular proves to be the closest in similarity; this fails to linguistically justify the fact that Wenchang vernacular has been recognized as the"standard form"of Hainan Min dialect, which may have to look for other explanations.