A Study On Reduplicated Adjectives In Ganzhou Dialect

Ganzhou dialect is a southwest Mandarin island surrounded by Hakka dialect. For its lack of description and its geographic and language characteristics, this paper provides a comprehensive and detailed description of the forms, semantic and grammatical functions of the reduplicated adjectives in Ganzhou dialect based on recoding and transcribing a range of language materials which need the premise of doing fieldwork.From the perspective of morphology, there are two types of reduplicated adjective in Ganzhou:full reduplicated adjectives with four patterns, namely AA, AABB, Ata?13A and Ako31At(?)ie31, and partial reduplicated adjectives with four different patterns, namely AAB, ABB, AXAB and ABAC. From the perspective of tone sandhi of the reduplicated forms, each pattern of reduplicated adjectives undergoes tone sandhi, showing regulations of phonetic shift.From the perspective of semantic functions, reduplicated adjectives have three major semantic functions:increase of quantity, description and evaluation. Because the meaning of the base has already been intensified during the process of reduplication, reduplicated adjectives are not available to be modified by the adverb ’very’ and ’much’ and apparently do not possess the comparative degree and the superlative degree. Additionally, reduplicated adjectives also, contain some emotions and represent subjective viewpoint of the speaker.Furthermore, from the perspective of grammatical functions, we discuss the grammatical functions of each reduplicated pattern. Most full reduplicated adjectives can function as predicate, attributive, adverbial and complement in a sentence. However, partial reduplicated adjectives are very different, for there are various patterns with different construction and constituents of reduplication in partial reduplicated adjectives. But all reduplicated adjectives in Ganzhou can function as predicate and complement in grammar. Meanwhile, when the reduplicated adjective functions as predicate or complement, the particle a33tsl°is used following them to soften the tone of the speaker and makes subjective viewpoint of the speaker more clearly. When the reduplicated adjective functions as attributive or adverbial, it needs the help of the particle ti°to modify nouns or verbs. However, some reduplicated adjectives which carries the characteristics of action can modify verbs directly.