A Study Of Locative Words In Wugang Dialect

Wugang locates in the southwest of Hunan province.Its dialect falls into the scope of Loudi-Shaoyang dialect of the time-honored Hunan dialect.Locative words in Wugang dialect carry the features of both the Hunan dialect and its own.The thesis focuses on the locative words of “urban dialect” in Wugang and gives an all-round and detailed argument over the use and characteristics of locative words in Wugang dialect.Well-documented,the thesis has sorted out past research achievements concerning the topic and drafted detailed research plans.It gives a comprehensive and detailed description on the basis of field investigations and a comprehensive probe into and documentation of the locative words in Wugang dialect and its usage.It also studies the topic by means of theories and methodologies of modern linguistics such as cognitive linguistics and grammaticalization from many fronts.First of all,the paper sorts out all locative words in Wugang dialect as five categories--the horizontal type I,the horizontal type II,the vertical type,the radio-type and the omni-type,and offers a detailed explanation of the meaning and usage of every type of locative words in Wugang dialect.Secondly,it works to analyze and describe the grammatical and lexical features of the five types of locative words.Wugang dialect contains 17 pure locative words among its locative words as a whole,including functional locative words and non-functional words.Compound locative words in Wugang dialect has flexible forms and complex structures,with double-syllable locative words being the most.When combined with other compositions except for a few double-syllable locative words such as“zuobian(the left)”,“youbian(the right)”,“zhongjian(the middle)”,most of other pre-positioned locative words are in single syllable.When post-positioned,locative words in single syllable loses its combination function while on the other hand,compound locative words in multiple syllables in the same scenario have a strong bond to nouns.From the syntactic function’s perspective,pure locative words are less independent and usually don’t serve as sentence compositions.However,locative phrases consisting of pure locative words can work as subject,object,attributive and adverbial;compound locative words are well independent to be sentence composition freely or make up locative phrases with other compositions as subject,object,attributive and adverbial in sentences.Seeing from the lexical meaning of locative words,locative words in Wugang dialect has witnessed a rough transformation of concrete lexical meaning to abstract one.Besides,when analyzed through a cognitive linguistics angle,locative cognition largely originates from humankind’s cognition of itself.Apart form its spatial location function,locative words in Wugang dialect also employs the methods of metaphor and projection to indirectly comprehend relatively abstract non-spatial concepts with the aid of spatial location,a relatively concrete concept.Grammaticalization-wise,we know through analysis that certain locative words like“gaodai(高头,up there)”,“drodi(脚底,down there)”and“shang(上,up)”have gone through the grammaticalization process from content words to half-content-and-half-funtion words to function words.Here’re more examples,“hwa(下,down)”,an abstract spatial term,has been functionalized as a temporal one;“li(里,inside)has been functionalized from a content word to a half-content-and-half-funtion one.Lastly,the thesis gives an analysis of the symmetry and non-symmetry features of locative words in Wugang dialect from such aspects as forms,semantics and the intensity of grammaticalization,among others.Having said that,the non-symmetry phenomenon in the intensity of grammaticalization of locative words was created by such factors as varied frequencies of use,cognition and the Mandarin.