The Syntactic And Discourse Cohesive Functions Of Personal Pronouns In Meixian Hakka Dialect

The research on personal pronouns in Meixian Hakka dialect is still a piece land waiting for study. It was lack of literature on personal pronouns in Meixian Hakka dialect. On that account, the research is about to describe and analyze the personal pronouns in Meixian Hakka dialect from the aspect of syntactic and discourse cohesive functions. In order to show these personal pronouns objectively, comprehensively and systematically, the author did fieldwork and recorded the spoken folktales as language materials.There is distinction between the singular form and the plural form of personal pronouns in Meixian Hakka dialect. The singular forms include the first personal pronoun ηai21, the second personal pronoun ni21, the third personal pronoun ki21. The plural forms are usually expressd by adding suffixes such as tεη44, tεη44nin21 to the corresponding personal pronouns. As for the third personal pronoun, there is no gender distinction between he and she in either spoken or written Mei Xian Hakka dialect. Although the third personal pronoun ki21 is used primarily to refer to people, it may refer to the animate objects, but not the inanimate ones. There is no distinction between nominative, accusative and genitive, however, ηa33 ’my’ and kεi33 ’his’are function as the genitive pronouns. These two words are the products of coalescence of the first personal pronoun ηai21 and third personal pronoun ki21 combine with the linking particle jεi44. Besides, there are the reflexive pronoun tshιka33, the referral pronoun nin21ka33, the pronoun of general designation thai44ka33, thai44ka33nin27 in Meixian Hakka dialect.From the perspective of syntactic function, the personal pronouns in Meixian Hakka dialect can generally serve as subject, object, adjective and so on. The reflexive pronoun, tsh1ka33 has two functions:the true reflexive pronoun, the emphatic function. When it functions as the true reflexive pronoun, tsh1ka33 is subject-oriented, i.e. it tends to pick a subject as its antecedent. As the emphatic function, the construction the corresponding pronoun+tsh1ka33 reinforces the pronoun, which can occur in any position.Due to the limitation in the length of the article, we mainly discuss the discourse cohesive function of the third personal pronoun and the omitted pronoun. The third personal pronoun shows stronger continuity and weaker continuity in the text. While the characters in the text are not complicated, the third personal pronoun shows the weaker continuity, otherwise, it shows the stronger continuity. The distribution of third personal pronoun ki21 in the text is influenced by the characters, plot, time, conjunction. The omitted pronoun pronoun is a typical type of the high accessibility marker, which is often posited in the beginning and in the middle of the sentence, and sometimes can be in other positions.