A Study On Descriptive Adjective In Macao Dialect

Macao dialect belongs to the Lou-shao dialects as a sub-Xiang dialect.There are 15 different structural patterns of descriptive adjectives in Macao dialect, such as "XA (ji), AX-li (ji), AXYB, AABB (ji), AXX-li (ji), AXAB, AXYZ, XXA-ji, ABXX-ji, XYYA (ji), XA-ba-A (ji), AX (li) AX (li) ".They can be classified into non-reduplicated descriptive adjectives, reduplicated descriptive adjectives and adjectives reduplication.According to their level meaning, descriptive adjectives in the dialect can be classified into three types and five levels.In Macao dialect,the grammatical meaning of descriptive adjectives has no relevance to their syntactic distributions.Different structural patterns,stress location and the length of its main vowel in syllable sometimes affect its level meaning,while whether it has a suffix "ji" or not affects its emotional meaning.Besides predication,complement, attributive and adverbial,most descriptive adjectives in Macao dialect can function as subjective and objective directly.The nominalization forms of descriptive adjectives can also function as predicative, attributive, complement, subjective andobjective.There are two methods for them to be nominalized:to superimpose and to substitute.To discuss the descriptive adjectives in a dialect,we have no choice but to mention the words which correspond to the word "de" in Beijing dialect. In Macao dialect,there are six forms such as "li,ji,liji,gaji,ligaji,ge" which have the same function as the word "de" in Beijing dialect.According to their usage,they can be classified into three groups:suffix of adverbs;suffix of descriptive adjectives and the marker of nominalization.After introducing the natural conditions and language conditions in Macao Village briefly,this thesis describes the structural forms,the grammatical meaning and their syntactic function of the descriptive adjectives in details,and compares them with which in Mandarin Chinese.At the same time,it discusses the points which ZHU-Dexi supported on "de"and the nominalization of descriptive adjectives.The facts in Macao dialect support ZHU's viewpoints.