A Variationist Analysis Of-Tou/-Mian Alternation In Chengdu Dialect

The national promotion of standard Mandarin(Putonghua)has yielded a mixture of locative markers-tou and-mian in the speech community of Chengdu,the provincial city in Southwest China.Very few studies have yet been initiated on the variable use of locative markers.This paper attempts to fill the gap by examining the variation between the suffix-tou,a locative marker in Chengdu dialect,and its counterpart-mian in standard Chinese.The data are chiefly drawn from the sociolinguistic interviews with 40 native speakers of Chengdu dialect conducted during the summer of 2017-2018.They were contacted through a social network approach,i.e.,the ‘friend of a friend'(Milroy 1980)and stratified according to their gender,age and education level.A monolingual speaker of Mandarin Chinese was interviewed as our baseline to further confirm this contact-induced suffixal change in an urban setting.Sociolinguistic interviews,picture descriptions,and question-answering pairs were employed for data collection,followed by a questionnaire scoring their language attitude.We made reference to both Labov's(1966)model of elicitation and Briggs'(1986)model of open-ended conversation for eliciting data.A collection of 1,636 tokens with-tou and-mian was extracted and coded for both linguistic(grammatical function and contextual styles)and social factors(language attitude,gender,age and education).The findings display that the standard Chinese form-mian has outnumbered-tou in terms of occurrence and has constituted the dominant locative marker in Chengdu dialect.It is also shown that participants with more exposure to standard Mandarin,either through mass media,job market or high level of schooling are preferable to the standard form.Both multivariate analysis and generalized mixed-effects logistic regression indicate combined effects from age,gender,style and education on the variable use of locative markers in Chengdu dialect.This study contributes to the variationist sociolinguistics with morphological evidence from the Chinese dialect.The Labovian paradigm successfully accounts for the variation of suffixes in Chengdu dialect: the vernacular-tou coexists with the standard-mian as patterned heterogeneous locative markers.The persistence of both categorical-tou(the stable dialectal use of-tou)and the non-categorical-tou(where variation occurs and the incoming empowered-mian comes to dominate)embodies possible competition between local solidarity and stance-seeking in language standardization,i.e.,the change from above and helps to better our understanding of the convergence and divergence in language contact.Most importantly,to our knowledge,this is the first study that systematically investigates the variation of Chinese locative markers.