| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 國文學系 === 99 === Miao-Yao languages constitute one of the primary language families of Southern China and Southeast Asia. They manifest a profound, prolonged contact relationship with Chinese, and occupy an unusually important place among the language groups of the region. The target language of this thesis, West-Hunan Miao, is none other than the eastern dialect of the Miao language (Miao branch, Miao-Yao family). The language has long been described as possessing abundant zhuang-ci (imitative or expressive words) in the Chinese descriptive works, an ill-defined term of unclear meanings. To refer to a subpart of what used to be called vaguely zhuang-ci, this thesis proposes the term ‘ideophones’, which has become standard in typological linguistics after its introduction in the 1970s from the investigation of African languages. A good many ideophones in West-Hunan Miao are assembled and analyzed in this thesis, and their unique morphological and syntactic properties are presented as evidence that they form a distinct lexical class in the target language.
The syntactic functions of West-Hunan Miao ideophones, unlike adverbials, include both adverbial modification and predication. Even more diagnostic evidence comes from morphology: ideophones in this language uniquely display as many as six morphological patterns operating on monosyllabic ideophone roots, shown as follows (where R= root, R’=rule-governed phonological variant of root):
I R-R states and movements [±dynamic] [+durable]
II tɑ44-R sudden semelfactive actions [+dynamic]
[-durable]
III V-R’-V-R states or qualities less vigorous than in
the R-R pattern
[-dynamic] [+durable] [-vigor]
IV (R’-R)’’-R’-R continuous states or movements
[±dynamic] [+durable]
V R’-R’-R-R states or movements; images more holistic
than the R-R pattern
[±dynamic] [±durable] [+holistic]
VI R’-R-R’-R rhythmic movements [+rhythmic] [+dynamic]
Of the above, R-R appears to be the basic pattern for West-Hunan Miao ideophones, from which the other variant morphological patterns are derived to express various Aktionsart meanings. These morphological patterns set ideophones clearly apart from the two semantically related word types, adverbials and onomatopoeic words.
Having established ideophones as a distinct word class on the basis of morphosyntactic criteria, the thesis proceeds to illustrate the semantic characteristics of ideophones---vividness of imagery and fine-tuned meaning differentiation---with a set of ideophones related to facial features and expressions, followed by a classification of ideophones into six semantic classes, and a systematic account of the semantic traits and usages of each class.
|
|---|
