The myth of a universal sinitic grammar : the case of basic locative constructions

Abstract

Chinese is often considered as a single language spoken from the far Northeastern China to the Southern edge of the territory. Not only are there ten main language groups within the Sinitic language family, which many researchers tend to call “dialect” groups; some features of these Sinitic languages do exhibit constructions that are distinctive from the rest – this thesis is going to show how the preference of Taiwanese speakers in using a strategy to denote static spatial relationship being different from that of Cantonese and Shanghainese speakers.

This thesis aims to consolidate our knowledge on the typology of Sinitic languages. In such pursuit, the domain of static locative expressions, and more precisely, the basic locative construction was chosen as the locus of investigation. Three Southern Sinitic languages were selected: Cantonese, Shanghainese and Taiwanese. This experimental study followed an established picture elicitation method in investigating spatial language. The main body of this thesis outlines the constructions used as the basic locative expression from a descriptive perspective. Following up on this is an evaluation of current models of the typology of locative constructions, which is shown to be insufficient to account for the data of these Sinitic languages. Based on the existing framework, a more dynamic model is introduced. Methods used in defining Mandarin postpositions are also found to be problematic in these data, suggesting certain aspects of the morphosyntax of Sinitic languages are substantially different from one another. Regarding the lexical semantics, cognate words are not always present and even if they are available, they tend to be used in varying constructions. At the syntactic level, the noun classifier rules diverge from one language to another. Over and above, an equivalent of a certain construction in one Sinitic language does not necessarily have the same pragmatic values as in another Sinitic language. Through the discussions on the listed issues at various levels, this thesis draws the conclusion that every Sinitic language demonstrates syntactic characteristics of its own, warning against over-generalization of results from one Sinitic language to all.