A Study Of Negatives In Huilai Dialect

This thesis is an analytical and systematic description of the seven negatives in Huilai Dialect,i.e.,m~7,bo~5,boi~7,bue~7,mian~2,mmo~2 and mai~3.Based on the current achievements of research on the grammar system of Southern Min,the thesis probes into the grammatical features of the negatives in question,yields a classification of their syntactic properties,distribution and usage and further elaborates on the types of negation markers in Huilai Dialect,so as to provide a profounder understanding of the negation system of the dialect and to supply data for its further study.Huilai Dialect is one of the variants of Southern Min Dialect of the Sinitic language.An increasing number of studies have been carried out on other sub-dialects of Southern Min,such as Taiwanese,Amoy Dialect,Chaoshan Dialect,Quanzhou Dialect,etc.;however,the study of Huilai Dialect has not been given enough attention although Huilai Dialect is associated with Chaoshan Dialect.Like other dialectal variants of Southern Min,Huilai Dialect has a complicated negation system.It has a greater number of negatives than most Sinitic languages.Of the seven negatives in Huilai Dialect,two are primitive negatives:the clausal negative m~7 and the lexical negative m~7-.The rest of the negatives are the fused forms of the clausal negative m~7 with other elements.For example,the negative bo~5is derived from the simple negative m~7 and its positive counterpart u~7;boi~7 is a fused form of m~7 and e~7,mian~2 a fused form of m~7 and ing~7,and mmo~2 a fused form of m~7and ho~2;and mai~3 is deriving by contracting m~7 and ai~3.In other words,negation in Huilai Dialect is somehow closely related to modality in the sense that in most cases,it takes portmanteau forms which express negation and modality at the same time rather than pure negation.In addition,it is found in this study that the properties and distributions of the negatives in Huilai Dialect are largely consistent with other Southern Min variants,with only a few differences between them.Among the seven negatives,m~7 and bo~5account for the most complex usage and occupy the most distributions while the other negatives can only be syntactically distributed into two to five kinds.