A Comparative Study Of Interrogatives On Tai Languages

Focused on synchronical materials,the present study investigates the morphological,semantic,syntactic and grammaticalized characteristics of interrogatives on Tai languages,a major branch of Tai-Kadai language family.From typological perspectivs,this study explores the similarities and differences of interrogatives across Tai dialects,and between Tai dialcets and world languages.This dissertation is organized into seven parts.The first chapter offers a brief introduction of the research targets,background,significance,theories,methodology and materials.Based on the literature review,this chapter proposes the reseach questions of this study.The second chapter analyzes the word formations of interrogatives on Tai dialects,including the forms,components and the numbers of the morphemes.The three types of forms of Tai interrogatives are monomorphemic word,compound and derivative.The components consist of interrogative morphemes,verbs,classifiers,demonstratives and nouns.Interrogatives forms can be analyzable,unanalyzable,and a kind of mixture.The range of the interrogative morphemes of Tai interrogatives is from 2 to 6.The number of morpheme increases form Northern branch of Tai to the Southwestern branch.There are three major series of morphemes,la?~2“which”,ki~3“how much/many”,and ma~2“what”.The first two series exist in Northern and Central branches of Tai,and the third series mainly exist in Southwestern branch.The various language environment influenes the word formations of Tai interrogatives.The third chapter deals with semantic accessibility of interrogative morphemes on the 31 Tai dialects.It is found that the semantic accessibility of the la?~2“which”series is the highest,ki~3“how much/many”on the second place and ma~2“what”on the third place.The semantic accessibility hierarchies of the three series are proposed.According to ponological,morphological and semantic features,la?~2“which”are regarded as indigenous words,ki~3“how much/many”and ma~2“what”are borrowed from Chinese.In addition,this chapter observes interrogative semantic development through comparing Wuming Zhuang and Wenshan Zhuang,finding out that series la?~2“which”can express indefinite meanings.The fourth chapter examines the syntactic functions of Tai interrogatives.Wuming Zhuang,Daxin Zhuang and Thai language are representatives of Northern,Central and Southwestern branches.It is found that the syntactic function of the la?~2“which”series is the strongest,ma~2“what”on the second place and ki~3“how much/many”on the third place.According to the analysis of the Tai interrogatives,we found that the word-building ability,semantic accessibility and syntactic functions of the three major morpheme series are correlated.The stronger the word-building ability is,the highrer semantic accessibility and the stronger syntactic function are,and vice versa.The fifth chapter explores the grammaticalization of Tai interrogatives.The demonstratives te~1“that”in Guigang Zhuang,Tianyang Zhuang and Guangnan Zhuang are related to the interrogatives.The chapter elaborates the situation,motivation and rules of the phenomenon that demonstratives te~1“that”grammaticalized in to interrogative morpheme.The sixth chapter focuses the selective meaning of the dominant position of the la?~2“which”series,investigating 59 ethnic languages in China that use selective interrogative pronouns to express the selection.The seventh chapter summarize the findings,innovations and the future works.