Study On The "Adjective-classifier" Constructions In Southern Min Dialect And Its Cross-domain Permeation

As a cross-territorial Chinese dialect which bears some influence both at home and abroad,the research interest of Chinese and foreign scholars on Southern Min dialect has never faded out for a long time.With the increasing attention to language resources in China,several projects have been initiated one after another in these years,such as"Audio Database of Chinese Language Resources"(in October 2008)and "Project for Protecting Language Resources in China"(in May 2015).Meanwhile,in the south of Fujian Province(i.e.the cities of Xiamen,Quanzhou and Zhangzhou),activities of dialect investigation and protection are also launched.Above are the backgrounds of this thesis.This thesis consists of five chapters,including the main part(Chapter 2 to 4),the introductory chapter(Chapter 1),and the final chapter(Chapter 5)which draws the conclusion and show the prospect of this thesis.Besides,Appendix 1 and 2 are also included.The introductory chapter centres on the review of previous research status of classifiers as well as the one of "adjective-classifier" constructions in written Mandarin,Chinese dialects and the language of network and new media.Thus,we believe that certain achievement of the research of the "adjective-classifier" constructions on both Cantonese and Mandarin has been obtained.As for the research of same constructions on Chinese dialects(including Southern Min dialect)and on the language of network and new media,the achievement remains scarce.Meanwhile,the purpose,the significance,the object,the method and the corpus of this research are also been discussed in this thesis,so as to the shortcomings of previous studies and the innovations of this thesis.In addition,some basic information of the informants who offered aid for finishing this thesis is also presented so as to some fundamental rules with the respect of phonetic transcription,character selection,and annotation of words,phrases and sentences.In Chapter 2,the "adjective-classifier" constructions of Southern Min dialect are thoroughly discussed,mainly on the internal aspect,including the semantic features,constraints,and combinations of the constituents(21 adjectives and 311 noun classifiers)in the constructions,along with different grammatical qualities and levels of lexicalisation of the whole constructions as two components consist.At last,several main constructions of "adjective-classifier" in Southern Min dialect are introduced according to different constituents of adjectives.In Chapter 3,the syntagmatic ability,the syntactic function,and pragmatic function of“adjective-classifier”constructions of Southern Min dialect are studied when they are combined with other elements,which can be regarded as the investigation on the external aspect.In this chapter,six categories and nine sub-categories of different context are listed and analysed respectively on how can these constructions be constrained and influenced by the context,especially on their syntactic distributions.At the end of this chapter,three additional pragmatic functions of the constructions compared with bare adjectives are expounded.The focus of Chapter 4 has shifted to the permeation of“adjective-classifier”constructions of Southern Min dialect.Based on the conclusions drawn in Chapter 2 and 3,eight characteristic items bearing characteristics of Southern Min dialect are extracted.With the help of corpus and other information technology tools,these items are then used successively for comparative analysis to two major register variants of Mandarin Chinese(i.e.written Mandarin and language of network and new media),and it is concluded that these constructions have permeated into Mandarin Chinese.The underlying reasons of this phenomenon is also been analysed.In the chapter of conclusion and prospect,several main conclusions are been summed up,problems and deficiencies of the thesis are analysed,and the direction of further researches are targeted.Two appendix are presented at the end of the thesis.Appendix 1 is a brief introduction to the phonetic system of the older neighborhood of Siming District,Xiamen,which is the representative of Southern Min dialect.While Appendix 2 shows the combination between adjectives and noun classifiers to constitute“adjective-classifier”constructions.Both of the two appendix are necessary supplement to the thesis.