A Study On Unique Functional Words Of Colloquial Mandarin In Malaysia

This thesis elaborates on the semantic features, syntactic features and causal factors ofvariation of ten function words which are frequently used in the colloquial Mandarin Chinesein Malaysia.The first chapter serves as an introduction to the whole paper. Chapter two is literaturereview. Chapter three briefly introduces the language culture of the Chinese ethnic societyand the Chinese education in Malaysia.Chapter four examines the distinctive features of four auxiliary words,“guo1”,“guo2”,“dao” and “zhe”. The word order of comparative sentence structure of “guo1” conforms thelinguistics universals of languages with prepositions (Mandarin is one of the languages withprepositions) more, as compared to the comparative sentence structure of “bi”.“Guo2”appears to be distinctive from “chongxin” and “zai” as it carries a corrective meaning.“Dao”can be a substitute of “de” as it can form both state complement and degree complement. Itcan form potential complement as well but it is strictly conditional. On the other hand, thecontinuous form of an action and an event can both be expressed by “zhe”.Chapter five discusses on the features of two adverbs,“cai” and “ji”.“Cai” is preferablyused among Malaysian Chinese instead of “zai” due to the influence of dialects.“Ji+A+yixia” emerges as a new popular sentence structure, meaning “quite”. It varies from itsoriginal form “ji+A+xia” in Cantonese due to the restriction of the Mandarin grammar.Furthermore, the semantic feature of “yixia” which is well-matched with its meaningcontributes to the rationale behind the conformation of this structure.Chapter six examines the features of four modal particles,“la”,“lo”,“meh” and “laide”.Wierzbicka’s “Natural Semantics Metalanguage” approach is used to examine the semanticfeatures of “la” and “lo”. The same method is applied to explain the three grammaticalfunctions of “meh” which are derived from its core meaning. Lastly, the “laide” sentencestructure of Malaysian Mandarin is not unique by itself but frequently used by Mandarin speakers in Guangdong province in China. However, some distinctive features are foundbetween them.Lastly, chapter seven summarizes the whole paper.