A Study Of Verbal Reduplication In Shanxi Dialect: An Aspectual Perspective

This thesis conducts an analysis of verbal reduplication in Shanxi Dialect from the aspectual perspective.There is rich and distinct use of reduplication forms of various word classes in the dialect,which has long aroused the attention of researchers.Authoritative monographs,such as A Report on Shanxi Dialect Investigation and Study(Hou & Wen 1993)and A Grammatical Analysis of Shanxi Dialect(Qiao 2000),all put the reduplication forms into study.However,most studies focus on the phonological and morphological features without thorough syntactic analysis.Hence,this thesis gives a classification and explanation of verbal reduplications under the framework of Four Layers Aspectual System(Chen 2007).Possible morphological forms of verbal reduplication in Shanxi Dialect are: the(ge)AA form,the ge-AA-er form,the ABAB form,the XBXB form,the XXBB form and the AABB form.The prefixes ge,hu and ri are frequently used together with verbal reduplications.From the semantic perspective,verbal reduplications in the dialect are divided into the delimitative aspect(the(ge)AA form,the XBXB form and the ABAB form)and the iterative aspect(the XXBB form,the AABB form and the ge-BB-er form).According to Chen's(2007)Four Layers Aspectual System,verbal reduplications in Shanxi Dialect belong to the phasal aspect.The two sub-categories,the delimitative aspect and the iterative aspect,are closely connected both in meaning and form with a lower degree of grammaticalization than the aspect markers zhe,le and guo.The features of the phasal aspect make it coexist or repel with the situation aspect and the viewpoint aspect,which could explain the legitimacy of sentences.Moreover,the writer has replenished the theory in the syntactical way.The lowest syntactic layer is the verbal aspect,which is characterized by the feature set [±PROCESS,±BOUNDED].The middle layer is the VP-inside aspect,where the verbal reduplication operates.The highest layer is the grammatical aspect,where the traditional aspectual markers are located.Different aspect layers lie in different components of the sentence structure connected by shared features.