| In part I, an evaluation is carried out to find out how the mainland Chinese speakers unconsciously show their social attitudes towards their own speech and the speech used by other Mandarin speakers such as Taiwanese. In part II, the lexical variation of airen (wife/husband) is described. In part III, the syntactic variation of the aspect marker guo is studied.;In the subjective evaluation study, speakers of the mainland Chinese speech community use adjectives such as natural, reliable, kind to describe their own speech and use adjectives such as soft, elegant, intimate to describe the speech used by Taiwanese speakers; in the lexical variation study, speakers favor the lexical items of Taiwanese speech rather than those of their own speech; in the syntactic variation study, they favor the syntactic feature of their own speech. The motivation of the synchronic variation is socially controlled. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.). |
