Gei'(给) And Constructions With 'Gei'(给) In Kaifeng Dialect

Kaifeng is located in the center of China, and being a seven-dynasty capital, it is west to Shangqiu, east to Zhengzhou, north to Xuchang, and south to the Yellow River. Kaifeng had been the capital of Henan province before 1954, a political, economic and cultural center as well. Kaifeng dialect is one of the north dialects, which is a representative dialect not only in Henan province but also throughout the country. However, there are few studies of Kaifeng dialect, especially grammar of it. Although Kaifeng dialect is so similar to Putonghua, it has its own characteristics in phonetics, vocabulary, grammar, etc. For example,'gei'and constructions with'gei'in Kaifeng dialect also have their own characteristics. In recent decades, Kaifeng dialect has been changed in some aspects and so have constructions with'gei'. However, these phenomena have not been a concern of language researchers.The aim of this study is to fill the gap in grammar research of Kaifeng dialect and lay a foundation for a comprehensive study. This paper studies'gei'and constructions with'gei'in Kaifeng dialect, and describes the characteristics of them.The methods of structuralism are used to describe grammar; the view of grammaticalization is adopted to investigate the change and development of words; the viewpoint of cognitive linguistics and functional grammar are employed to interpret language phenomena. In this paper, example sentences are all collected by the oral corpus survey, mainly introspection and concentrated survey. When surveying dialect users of different ages, the author recorded the old-style and the new-style of the same usage and then compared them.Firstly, this paper defines the character of'gei'in Kaifeng dialect, sums up the distinctions between verb, auxiliary, Interjection and preposition by means of formal standards. Secondly, this paper conducts a detailed description and analyzes the use of the different speech of'gei'in Kaifeng dialect. There are two kinds of sentences with'gei'in Kaifeng dialect, one being disposal sentences , the other passive sentences. This paper describes the sentence meaning of the disposal sentences and passive sentences with'gei'in Kaifeng dialect, then identifies the differences in the old and new styles. Thirdly, this paper compares the'gei'in Kaifeng dialect with that in other dialects. Last but not least, from the point of view of grammaticalization, this paper analyzes the source and motivation of disposal sentences with'gei', and studies the motivation of'gei'expressing passive and disposal in Kaifeng dialect.The achievements of this paper are as follows: Making a detailed, accurate description of'gei'and constructions with'gei'in Kaifeng dialect, and classifying them using form criteria; analyzing the source of disposal sentences with'gei'in Kaifeng dialect and why we use it from the point of view of grammaticalization; analyzing why the sentences with'gei'can express passive and disposal in the viewpoint of both internal and external factors; giving the reasons why'gei'can express passivity in new-style Kaifeng dialect; summing up the old-style and the new-style similarities and differences from the perspective of social linguistics.In conclusion, there are certain differences between old-style and the new-style Kaifeng dialects. The most obvious difference resides in pronunciation and vocabulary, and next in grammar.'Gei'has three lexical categories of preposition, verb and auxiliary. There are two kinds of sentences with'gei'in Kaifeng dialect, disposal sentences and passive sentences, with distinct usages respectively. In Kaifeng dialect, both the new-fashioned and old-fashioned people use'gei'expressing disposal. Old-fashioned people use'jiao'express passive only, but nowadays they not only use'jiao'but also'gei'and'rang'expressing passivity. Moreover, this language phenomenon only exists in some people's languages. This usage is not developed by itself, but by some causes outside of their own language(such as social reason, language user's reason, Mandarin's influence and so on).