Multi-perspectives On Body Action Verbs Of Hubei Dialect

Semantic maps are powerful tools for analyzing cross-language variations.In recent decades,scholars have made great progress in its theoretical and applied research.Semantic maps originally used to study cross-language polyfunctional grammatical markings are used for analyzing grammatical words and content words in dialect of Chinese.Body action verbs are the most frequently used and important type of content words in human activities.Human activities will be constrained by geographical conditions,and these constraints will be reflected in language.Therefore,it is feasible to apply the related theories and methods of linguistic typology and linguistic geography to the study of body action verbs.From the perspective of linguistic typology and linguistic geography,this dissertation focuses on the first five body action verbs in the Swadesh list with semantic map model and time geography.In terms of the semantic map model,the algorithm for inferring implications is updated,and classical semantic maps are constructed based on the results obtained via the Apriori algorithm.This algorithm is used for analyzing the implications between primitives.In terms of linguistic geography,implications are placed at geographic space for analysis.At the same time,relevant concepts and methods from time geography are introduced to explore the vitality of primitives and the types and constraints of dialect change.The paper as a whole is divided into seven chapters:Chapter one: Introduction.The definition of body action verbs and the summary of the research on semantic maps and linguistic geography are introduced as well as the content,methods,key point and the sources of language data in this article.Chapter two: Implications and Algorithm optimization in semantic maps model.Association analysis is usually used to find hidden relationships between items,which is actually implications.The Apriori algorithm is an effective algorithm for performing association analysis.This algorithm is used to find the implications between primitives,and it has relevant parameters for more comprehensive analysis.It can be used to calculate the frequency of primitives,solve the problem of co-occurrence of two primitives and visualize the co-occurrence of multi-primitives.In addition,practicable implications can be found via the parameter Lift,and the problem of imbalance of implication between primitives can be tackled via the parameter Confidence,then find the preferred implications.The undirected connections transformed into directed implications according to association analysis,revealing rules hard to notice before.Chapter three: The utilization of time geography in the linguistic research.This chapter introduces terms of time geography and their applicability in linguistic study.It discusses the behavior characteristics of immigrants under constraints in the spatial and temporal dimensions and the influence on language in terms of microcosmic to macrocosmic.Trying to explore the mechanism of language and dialect change from the perspectives of space,time,and behavior.Chapter four: Sorting out the primitives of words and the language data obtained by fieldwork.This chapter focuses on the body action verbs ‘drink’,‘eat’,‘bite’,‘see’,and ‘sleep’ which are still used in Hubei dialect.The meanings of words have been sorted out diachronically,striving to explore the earliest age when each word meaning roughly appeared.The language data obtained by fieldwork is recorded in detail,trying to show the synchronic conditions of the meaning of the verbs above in Hubei more comprehensively.Chapter five: Association analysis of primitives of body action verbs.This chapter conducts an association analysis on the primitives of the body action verbs discussed in this article,calculates the value of support of primitives of each verb,constructs classical semantic maps by finding frequent itemset,discusses the imbalance of implications between primitives as well as the independence and vitality of primitives.Chapter six: Geographical manifestations of the spread and change of primitives.Implications are placed at geographic space for analysis,and the geographic expressions of the implications are analyzed.From the perspective of time geography,it discusses the vitality of primitives,the manifestations of elementary events in temporal and spatial behavior in language change,and the types and three constraints of dialect evolution.Chapter seven: Conclusions and prospects.A summary of this paper is presented and the possible future research directions in the field of linguistic typology and geographic linguistics are proposed.