Kunming Dialect Syntax Research

This dissertation is devoted to a study of some distinctive morphological phenomena, syntactic constructions and functional words in Kunming dialect which belongs to the southwest subdialect in Chinese dialects. The main contents involve: (1)Character 着 ZHE;(2)The exceeding combination of verb reduplication;(3)The reduplicated adjectives and some special combination;(4) The reduplication of non-adjectives;(5) The reduplicated quantifiers;(6) The suffix 儿 ER; (7) The interrogative sentence 格 GE VP;(8)The special usage of V 得 DE and its sentence pattern.The study argues that there are four pronunciations and eleven usages of character ZHE in Kunming dialect. It explores its historical origin in the approach combined synchronic and diachronic in Kunming dialect.Comparing with Mandarin Chinese, Kunming dialect is much richer in reduplication. The dissertation discusses those special functions and combinations of reduplicated words and their related syntactic phenomena in this dialect.Based on the comparison with other Chinese dialects, this work discusses that suffix ER underwent five developing phases in different Chinese dialects and concludes the one in this dialect represents the last phase. It is further made clear that conformity rule of suffix in the process of historical change.The interrogative sentence "Ge VP" is the most distinctive syntactic phenomenon which stands for the one of four types among the southeast languages. The thesis discovers its nature, scope and status in the entire interrogative sentence system and discusses its geographical distribution and possible origin. The thesis proves in some detail that Ge VP has two kinds of functions: the one is a confirmed question, the other one is unconfirmed question from which some crucial differences between Kunming dialect and Mandarin Chinese are clarified. It is also given a lively description of the competition between interrogatives of Ge VP and VPnegVP based on the sociolinguistic investigation. The fact is that VPnegVP are intruding theembedding clauses where originally Ge VP pattern occupied.Finally, this work concludes some important theoretic and methodological principles and rules:Firstly, it proposes the principles of the diachronic specialization and synchronic balance in the process of the grammaticalization.Secondly, it points out that the synchronic differences between different Chinese dialects projected the diachronic developing phases.Thirdly, it puts forward that the process mode of variation.