Grammatical Comparison Between Chinese Hualin Dialect And African Cibemba From The Perspective Of Linguistic Typology

Language typology is an important branch of contemporary linguistics.Its goal is to reveal the hidden commonalities and rules behind seemingly disparate human languages.The approach is to classify languages by their structural features through linguistic comparisonThis paper makes a comparative study of Hualin dialect and the Bemba language from the lexical and syntactic levels.Lexical comparison covers word class markers,nouns,pronouns,verbs,adjectives,numerals,adverbs and other minor items.Syntactic comparison includes word order,quotation,be-copula sentences,interrogative markers,concord and other minor items.This is a specific application of typology in the comparative study of Chinese and African languages.The corpus of this thesis is collected and sorted according to the book entitled A Handbook for Grammatical Investigation and Research written by Liu Danqing.The writing is guided by two classical works,one Language Universals and Linguistic Typology:Syntax and Morphology,the other Typology and Universals,written respectively by Bernard Comrie and William Croft.This paper reveals some grammatical features of Hualin dialect and the Bemba language.For example,Hualin dialect is a kind of Gan dialect,but its first personal pronoun plural has the difference between exclusion and inclusion.This characteristic is different from most known Hakka and Gan dialects.Another example is that Hualin dialect has a three-way distinction in the division of space denoted by its demonstratives.First,the space is divided into "here" and "there".Then,the "here"reference can be further divided into two levels,one very close,the other a little bit far.The Bemba language,however,has a four-way distinction.First,the space is also divided into "here" and "there".Then,both the "here" and "there" are further split in half,thus making four the final number of division.This paper takes note of the cultural concepts of "a male taking in a female through marriage" and "a female being entrusted to a male by marriage",which is reflected by the verbs in Bemba.Last but not least,a detailed investigation is made on kinship terms,color words and body parts words in the Bemba language.