Investigation On The Sentence-final Particle Lai Of Xiangxi Jishou Dialect In Hunan

Most of Indo-European languages use verbal inflection to mark tense to express temporal meaning. Instead, most Sino-Tibetan languages lack of explicit morphologies,such as Mandarin Chinese, temporal meaning in it is expressed by aspect markers,temporal adverbials, contexts and so on.In this thesis, we aim to investigate the special usage of lai in Jishou dialect. Lai locates behind the verbs, adjectives and the nouns and it always co-coccurs with le at the end of a sentence. The meaning of lai is like be going to/will in English. For example: Shui kai lai le.(The water will be boiled soon.). We will make a sufficient exploration on semantic interpretation and syntactic distribution of lai in Jishou dialect.We observe that the sentence with lai indicates the action or the state will occur or change in the near future, after the speaking time. It requires the verbs that enter the sentence have a lexical meaning or both the speaker and listener have a mutual understanding of the preparation stage. In addition, lai also has an urging or reminding mood in sentences.Through the study, we have found that lai is associated with future tense interpretation. Borrowed from the analysis of Sybesma’s about Cantonese’ tense(2004),we think that lai has the similar function with lei4, and lai is an operator related with future tense meaning. Yao in Jishou dialect is a typical general future tense marker, and lai is immediate future tense operator. Yao is more widely used than lai, and there are a lot of ungrammatical sentences with lai will be grammatical when we add yao in these sentences. We prove that this usage of lai in Jishou dialect is evolved from the movement verb lai, which is a common seen phenomenon in the world of languages.According to Bybee et al.(1994), the future tense marker/operator lai always possesses the meaning of immediate future.In this thesis, we also have an analysis of postpositional future tense marker/operator from linguistic typology, and we found that there is a widely existence of futurity category in Sino-Tibetan family of languages; Lai in Jishou dialect is just this postpositional marker.