The “verb+dao” Structure In The Hakka Text First Book Of Reading

This thesis answers the following questions by examining “verb-dao 倒” structure in First Book of Reading,the historical document on the Hakka dialects of 19 th century Hong Kong New Territories : What is the nature of dao 倒 in Hakka dialects?What complement does it serve? What semantics does it express? Moreover,is it an aspect marker? This thesis presents the development process of the prescriptive structure from a microscopic perspective,and uses Chinese(historical)dialect materials to prove that the prescriptive structure is an important source of aspectual markers.The first chapter surveys the literature on complements,and summarizes the relevant research results.The second chapter describes the syntactic distribution and semantic features of the “verb-dao 倒” in First Book of Reading,and compares dao 到 with dao 倒 in First Book of Reading.The third chapter describes the other perfective markers,such as kai 开,li 里,lai来 and de 得 in First Book of Reading,and compares dao 倒 with these four markers.The fourth chapter mainly compares the “verb-dao 倒” in First Book of Reading with the “verb-dao 倒(dao 到)” in the modern Hakka dialect and other southern dialects.The fifth chapter summarizes the work.The basic conclusions of the article are as follows:1.In terms of syntactic distribution,dao 倒 in First Book of Reading is mainly used as a result complement and a possible complement;The object of “VP de 得 dao倒” is basically before the complement dao 倒.In terms of semantic features: most of the dao 倒 in First Book of Reading are used as complements and perfective markers,expresse consequential sense and perfect sense.2.Compared with other Hakka dialects,in terms of phonetic form,dao 倒 in modern Hakka is the same as First Book of Reading,the difference is that dao 倒 in some modern Hakka dialects can be marked as continuous.3.Compared with dao 倒 in First Book of Reading,dao 倒 in other southern dialects is more diverse in phonetic form,has wider syntactic distribution,and has various semantic features.In addition to perfect meaning,it also expresses continuous meaning and degree.Its grammaticalization into aspect markers in complement positions is a common phenomenon in southern dialects.