A Vocabulary Study Of Chinese Folk Song Hua’er

Hua’er,a kind of folk song with unique singing style and singing language,is sung among four provinces of Han ethnic group and some minority groups : Gansu,Ningxia,Qinghai and Xinjiang.The performers of Huaer,regardless of ethnic group or the spreading areas,all use the local northwest dialect of Chinese to sing Huaer.The participants are mostly the people at lower classes.Yet its language is rich in regional and popular features.When singing,they mostly use the method of comparison.The content not only manifest love,but also covers all kinds of natural landscapes on the Northwest regions,as well as all aspects of daily life and work of local rural people.The impromptu singing of "Huaer" is a valuable language research material combined with local features and a great amount number.The thesis has eight chapters.The first chapter is the introduction,which first reviews the collection,arrangement and research characteristics of Huaer in the past 100 years,introduces the history and current situation of Huaer linguistic research,discusses the value of Huaer in the study of Chinese history,the research value of Huaer vocabulary,and the materials and methods of this study.And chapter two depicts the content of noun abstract connected with Huaer.Also the words concerning names,bodies,food,animals and plants,disease and medical treatment,clothing,living and production equipment,orientation architecture,natural phenomena,social institutions,rules and regulations,etiquette and customs,abstract notions,pronouns and instructions,etc..Chapter three focus on the words expressing the concept of action behavior in Huaer,which refers to the growth of human life,five-sensory behavior,physical behavior,life behavior,farming and animal husbandry behavior,conscious behavior and non-human behavior in nature.Chapter Four has something to do with the following words expressing the state of nature in Huaer,involving the external appearance,internal quality,analogy,quantity,time,scope and degree of people and objects.Therefore,Chapters 2,3 and 4 mainly classify and describe the words in Huaer which are different from common words according to the aggregation relation of similar meanings.Meanwhile The fifth chapter introduces the basic features of Huaer vocabulary from four aspects: the coverage of Huaer vocabulary,the epochality of Huaer vocabulary,the popularity of Huaer vocabulary and the polymorphism and homonym of a word.Moreover Chapter 6 mainly analyses the word-formation of Huaer,and discusses the active affix morphemes and root morphemes in Huaer,the reduplicated words,reduplicated words,reduplicated suffixes,homonymic words with different prefixes,abbreviations and participles,and the three-syllable words with the same initial and final morphemes in Huaer.Furthermore,The seventh chapter mostly studies the meaning of Huaer,which is different from Putonghua in three sections.The synonymous aggregation and polysemous aggregation in Huaer are discussed.And the last chapter 8 mainly discusses the foreign elements in the vocabulary of Huaer.The loanwords in Huaer come from the words of ethnic minority groups and foreign languages.There are temporary borrowing elements when singing,as well as elements entering the vocabulary system of Northwest Chinese dialect.