On The Phenomena Of Morphophoneme In The Ruian Dialect

The Ruian dialect is a significant member of Wu dialect.We have been devoteing to such a specialized job-concentrating on the phenomena of morphophoneme in the Ruian dialect.We will begin with two particular cases;one is that the classifiers' sound-change into the entering-tone,also known as the fourth tone in traditional Chinese.The other is the spontaneous tone-related meaning discriminating about complements.In the case of classifiers,the counting function disappears when classifiers change their tone into the entering-tone.In addition,the classifiers that changing their tone can show up alone to play a role of arguments,attributive marker and nominal determiner showing definiteness.The general classifier Ge,which changes its sound into entering-tone,has turned into neutral demonstrative.Other classifiers have obtained part of functions of neutral demonstrative.To analyze synchronically,they are such functions that do not exist in the classifiers of mandarin and other dialects.And the Ruian dialect uses the entering-tone as the signal of the grammatical change.To analyze diachronically,it is the change(stretching to be exact according to the amount)of the funcitons of classifiers,whose essence is that classifiers obtain some part of proximal demonstratives' function,they are.in fact,mixed up with the tone-change on the surface.It is a typical kind of phenomenon of morphophoneme.What's more,we hold the view that entering-tone general classifier Ge has now become a definite article,while other entering-tone classifiers have become a series of quasi-definite articles that have developed adversely and can express the meaning of short distance(both realistic and mental)sometimes.In a word,it is changing into entering-tone that gives the pronoun function to classifiers.The stronger link between classifiers and nouns in semantics is,the more significant the pronoun function becomes.The relationship between classifiers of Ruian dialect and its nouns are quite fine so that when classifiers change sound into entering-tone,they can show strong function of pronoun.In the case of the spontaneous tone-related meaning discriminating about complements,tone-change can tell the differences in the chain:complements>aspect marker>complement marker.The right located constituents are more likely to pronounce lightly.This tone-change is spontaneous and full of grammatical meaning rather than simple natural phonetic change,which makes it a kind of typical phenomenon of morphophoneme.We provided expressions glossed according to the Leipzig Glossing Rules from natural corpus,combining the way of synchronic description,comparative analyses as well as comprehensive generalization.