A Phonological Analysis Of Chinese Diminutives

Diminutive is a universal concept in world languages and it generally refers to the expression of smallness.Besides that,it also expresses meanings of loveliness,fondness and tease.In fact,a variety of morphological devices can be employed to form diminutives,including affixation,reduplication,changes of noun-class or gender,and shift of a consonant,vowel or tone.Many studies abroad on diminutives are conducted with foreign languages,whereas studies at home merely focus on describing the linguistic data and they are devoted to coming up with a historical timeline of Chinese diminutive development rather than investigate the linguistic commonalities and structural rules behind the various data.Moreover,their scope is within one dialect or one dialect area,which lacks systematic comparison and generalization across dialects.In a word,there is no comprehensive and systematic study of Chinese diminutives in light of generative phonology and from the typological perspective.Therefore,this thesis aims to fill in the phonological gap of Chinese diminutive research based on the linguistic data of diminutives from various Chinese dialects.Different diminutives of different Chinese dialects are put together,categorized,presented and analyzed in this thesis so as to provide a general picture of diminutive forms in Chinese dialects.Equally important,Chinese diminutives across different dialects are examined in virtue of contemporary linguistic theories,particularly within the framework of generative phonology,with a particular focus on the following four major issues:(1)How many types of diminutives are there in Chinese dialects in terms of phonological structure?(2)What are the phonological behaviors of Chinese diminutives based on contemporary phonological theories?(3)What phonological rules govern the variations of diminutive markers?(4)What is the linguistic universal of diminutives in different Chinese dialects?After a systematic analysis of various data,this thesis has found these different diminutives such as diminutive affixation,diminutive syllable merger,diminutive rime change,diminutive tone sandhi and diminutive reduplication.Each of these diminutive devices is analyzed in the framework of generative phonology.Diminutive affixations in Chinese are subdivided into diminutive suffixation,prefixation and infixation.Diminutive suffixation is the most elaborated section with er-suffixation as the most frequently used diminutive markers.Diminutive syllable merger is realized with an unsyllabic diminutive marker merged with the lexical syllable,among which,the simple retroflex and the nasal segment are the most frequently used diminutive markers.The realization of diminutive syllable merger is configurated by the Chinese syllable structure.Diminutive rime change is studied in light of feature spreading and markedness theory.The changing pattern is proved to simplify the rimes by reducing segments and to change toward the unmarked vowel schwa.Another diminutive device is diminutive tone sandhi,which is classified into two,both of which exhibit the intimate relation between diminutive meanings and high pitch.Also,the counterexamples of low pitch diminutive tones are also provided and explained in consideration of marking the diminutive meanings.Diminutive reduplication is comprised of full reduplication and partial reduplication and is examined in the aspect of segments and tones.Based on the linguistic data and the phonological analysis,there are two general trends for the diminutive forms in Chinese dialects:one is to change towards unmarkedness and the other is on the contrary towards markedness to highlight the diminutive meanings.