Disposal construction in the Chenghai dialect of Chaoshan

Abstract

Like many other varieties of Southern Min, Chaoshan makes use of a broad range of markers and constructions to express displacement or disposal meanings, with the head-marking kai5 i1 construction being relatively distinctive of this dialect cluster; meanwhile, dependent-marking disposal constructions marked with pa2 and tsiaŋ1, borrowed from the literary layer, are also attested. A combination of these two types of constructions produces the double-marking construction, which may serve to disambiguate between the disposal and benefactive interpretations of kai5. Moreover, topicalization represents another common strategy for expressing displacement. Focusing on the Chenghai dialect of Chaoshan, this study examines the use of various types of disposal constructions, and the competition among them. To this end, we carried out the fruit cart task to elicit the production of disposal constructions from native speakers of the Chenghai dialect. We totally recruited 30 participants of different age groups and elicited 365 disposal constructions altogether. In the dissertation, we will specifically summarize the sentence structures derived from the experiment and analyze the characteristics of each marking strategy. We predict that the dependent-marking strategy will become increasingly common at the expense of the zero-marking strategy. Meanwhile, the head- and double-marking strategies will remain stable.