The Research Of Tangxian Dialect Preposition "Li"

The dialect of Tangxian, where is only200kilometers away from Beijing, was tought to be almost the same with the mandarin and got little attention from the academics.There remains a blank spase on the grammar research of Tangxian dialect.But after my investigation, I was pleasantly surprised by its contrasts with mandarin whether in phonetics, lexicon or grammar.There is so many points waiting to be exploited.The function word "li" is just one of them.The first chapter presents the general situation of Tangxian and Tangxian dialect, describes its phonetic, lexical and grammatical characteristics by providing some typical examples.The second chapter analyses the distribution and function of "li" from three aspects at grammar, semantics and pragmatics, and as a result defines "li" as a preposition. By comparing "li" with other perpositions of tangxian dialect and prepositions of mandarin, the third chapter discovers many chacteristics of "li ", such as phonetic reduction, fixed position (postfixed to verb) and so on.We defines it as a "preposition after verb",which is rather rare in Modern Chinese.After that, we expands our research to other dialects of Chinese and finds out many prepositions that is more or less similar with "li",so that we can get a better view on its grammaticalization.The fourth chapter illustrates the difference between "prep before verb"and "prep after verb" and explains the reason why "prep after verb" goes much further in the progress of grammaticalization. The last chapter points out the thesis’ contribution, weakness and unresolved issues, which need more academic colleagues’efforts.