An Investigation Into The Reduplication Forms In Xiang Dialects

As an important grammatical means,reduplication is very widely used in most languages of the world.In Chinese dialects,it is especially colorful.The reduplication phenomena of different dialects share many common features,and they also have their own characteristics. Reduplication in Xiang dialects is also very rich,some of them are very special.Studying it deeply,it is not only useful to have a comprehensive understanding into the reduplication phenomena and the grammatical features of Xiang dialects,but also useful to summarize the laws of reduplication of Chinese dialects,to promote the comparative study of Chinese dialects and the dialect typological study of the reduplication phenomena of Chinese.Based on field research and the existing literatures,this dissertation comprehensively describes the reduplication phenomena of the main parts of speech,phrases,and some reduplication sentence structures (including secondary reduplication) of Xiang dialects,synthetically using the methods of investigating,comparison,combination methods not only of synchronic and diachronic but also of description and interpretation,and methods of typology.lt also compares the reduplication phenomena of Xiang dialects with a multi-angle perspectives of synchronic and diachronic,including the following levels:inside the Xiang dialects,between the Xiang dialects and the non-Xiang dialects in Hunan Province,and also between the Xiang dialects and other dialects outside of Hunan Province and the ancient Chinese,in order to seeking the similarities and differences between Xiang dialects and the Mandarin and other Chinese dialects,mining the typology significances of reduplication in Chinese dialects,understanding the history and origin relationships of reduplication of Xiang dialects.The studies shows that,on the one hand,Xiang dialects reflect some universal commonalities of reduplication of Chinese and even human languages.Based on the materials of Xiang dialects and cross-dialect comparison,the dissertation summes up about ten implicational universals concerning with reduplication which have typology significances.On the other hand,Xiang dialects inherit a lot of reduplication forms from the ancient Chinese,and also produce some innovative usages during the subsequent development,so that they show some strong personalities in some certain respects.The formation of the commonalities and differences of reduplication of Xiang dialects has both factors of common universals of human languages,but also factors of the inheritance and innovation to the ancient Chinese,in addition,dialects contact and language development itself also play a certain role.Besides the exordium and concluding remarks,the dissertation is constituted by6chapters:The exordium makes a brief review of the current research status on the reduplication of Chinese and Xiang dialects,and an introduction of the main contents and research significance of this study and the theories and methods this study used.It also gives an explanation of the investigation information such as the selecting of survey areas,corpus sources,and the pronunciation interviewees.From Chapter1to Chapter4,the paper discusses the reduplication phenomenon of the main parts of speech in Xiang dialects.lt describes the structure forms,grammatical and semantic functions of the reduplication of nouns,measure words,verbs and adjectives,and makes a comparison from the two perspectives of synchronic and diachronic.Chapter5discusses the reduplication phenomena of phrases in Xiang dialects.Firstly,it summarizes the three kinds of phrase-reduplication such as measure word phrases,verb phrases and adjective phrases.Then it focuses on the’VXVX’verb phrases from the respects of syntactic function,semantic function and its internal structure.It also makes a cross-dialects comparison among the Xiang dialects and the non-Xiang dialects in Hunan Province and also other dialects outside of Hunan Province.Chapter6discusses some reduplication sentence structures in Xiang dialects.It mainly describes its reduplicative A-not-A questions and topic-copying constructions.Through a cross-dialects comparison,it rethinks the commonalities and types of the reduplicative A-not-A questions in Chinese and the word-order type of Xiang dialects.In the section of the concluding remarks,it summarizes the internal and external commonalities and the internal differences of the reduplication phenomenon of Xiang dialects on the basis of the above studies,and analyzes the reasons for these commonalities and differences.Lastly,it points out the main originalities as well as its weaknesses of this paper.