Syntactic Changes In Language Contact

Almost all languages are not spoken in isolation, since they will contact with each other in different degrees and forms, and correspondingly have influence on each other. When the speakers of different languages or dialects contact with each other, it will at least lead to the changes of one language or dialect in different levels, such as in phonetics, lexicon and syntax, or other sociolinguistic forms.With the development and deepening of the reform and opening-up policy, there are increasingly more extensive and deeper contacts, for instance, trade contact, cultural exchange, and migration among people in many coastal cities of Guangdong Province and those from different places throughout China. All forms of contacts have impact on languages and dialects such as Putonghua and Guangzhou dialect. In this process of contact between Putonghua and Guangzhou dialect, a new transitional language variety,"Guangzhou-style Putonghua"appears. It refers to a linguistic phenomenon that some characteristics of Guangzhou dialect appear in the use of Putonghua.The study will take the reverse word order of"Guangzhou-style Putonghua"for example to analyze syntactic changes from the perspective of language contact of sociolinguistics; and research methods in sociolinguistics are mainly adopted. At the very beginning, recording and observation are applied to collect a large amount of the data of"Guangzhou-style Putonghua"with 140 informants who are familiar with Guangzhou dialect and Putonghua in Guangzhou City through the field survey, and then the distributional analysis and multivariate analysis are used to analyze these linguistic data. After that, a questionnaire survey on people's attitude towards"Guangzhou-style Putonghua"is conducted as a supplement. Finally, we analyze the data obtained quantitatively with the mathematical statistics methods with helps from several softwares such as GOLDVARB X, SPSS (13.0) and Excel (2007).It is found that the appearance of"Guangzhou-style Putonghua"is the result of dominant influence brought by Guangzhou dialect during the communication among people who use Putonghua. That is, when people use Putonghua to communicate with each other, they carry the syntactic features of Guangzhou dialect into Putonghua. In all four types of the reverse word order of"Guangzhou-style Putonghua", the reverse word order of adverb is most frequently seen, while the reverse word order in comparative sentence is not so often. The reverse word order of modifier to its noun and the reverse word order of double objects are seldom seen. In addition, females use"Guangzhou-style Putonghua"more than males; those who are from Guangzhou city are easily interfered by their native dialect, and they use"Guangzhou-style Putonghua"more often than those who come from other cities; those who are from 26 to 35 years old like to use this language variety more than other age groups. It is proved that people in general take a positive attitude on"Guangzhou-style Putonghua". Females accept this language variety more willingly than males; and speakers from Guangzhou city have a higher tendency of accepting"Guangzhou-style Putonghua"than those from other cities. Another variable like age also affects the language attitudes, and those from 26 to 35 years old accept this transitional language variety most easily than other age groups.With the enhancement of cultural exchange among different areas, there will be more and more contacts between Putonghua and all kinds of dialects. There is no doubt that the appearance of the new language varieties will bring great challenge to the common language, so it is necessary to make language planning to make dialect adapt to the development direction of the common language so as to make them develop in harmony.Due to the limitations of the present research, the findings and conclusions of this thesis are rather preliminary, which require further research at a more general level.