The structure of ideophones in southern Sinitic

Abstract

This thesis talks about the structure of ideophones in Southern Sinitic. Ideophone is an interesting word class that has been studies in a world atlas, while the Sinitic is just like an enclave under the context. This thesis is a try on analyzing the “state adjectives” and the onomatopoeia Chinese linguistics used to call from the ideophonic perspective. Treating Ruihong (a sub-dialect of Gan) as an entry point, structural markedness of ideophones in Southern Sinitic is described in a formal-functional way. At last, some typological attributes of the Sinitic ideophones have been summarized.

Chapter 5 to Chapter 9 is the part of descriptive introduction. Each chapter picks one or several relevant forms of ideophones, and then start analysis about their structural markedness. Each Chapter has its emphasis: Chapter 5 focuses on how to identifying an ideophone from its phonotactic distribution, lack of written form, flexible word class and sound symbolism; Chapter 6 is about the most important XA ideophones in Ruihong, descriptions on characteristics like high tone and checked tone’s wide usage, disappearance of nasal coda after syllable final stop, grammaticalization and deideophonization, etc. are elaborated. Chapter 7 is about two reduplicative forms XX and AXX, comparison on the usage of XA and AXX between Gan, Xiang and other southern Sinitic is this chapter’s focus. Chapter 8 is mainly about prosodic features of the onomatopoeia and the mimicking words. Chapter 9 tries to connect the form and the semantic function, using AABB and AliXY and infix “pat” as examples, a detailed description about how these forms connect with meanings has been given. At last, in the conclusion, summary about the common points and differences in Southern Sinitic are listed. Basically, in the phonetic and phonological part, there are more common points, while in the morpho-syntactic part, differentiation is more apparent.