JCL Monograph Series NO.14 专著系列 14 卷 – 1999

Abstract 摘要
Modern linguistic study on the dialects started with Luo Changpei’s work on the Xiamen dialect published in 1930. A detailed examination of the phonological relationship between the readings of individual characters in the Xiamen dialect and those in the Qieyun system, Luo’s book paved the way for subsequent research on Min dialectology. However, it was not until Tung Tung-ho’s study (1960) on the four South Min dialects that we began to have access to reliable descriptive data collected by modern field methods. His study provided fairly complete lexicons and included long stories, phonetically transcribed, instead of readings of individual characters.

Traditionally, the Min dialects are divided into two branches; namely, Southern Min and Northern Min. In 1963, Pan Maoding et al. classified the Min dialects into five subgroups: Eastern Min, Puxian, Southern Min, Central Min, and Northern Min. This subgrouping has gained further support from Li Rulong and Chen Zhangtai’s research findings (1991) and is now considered a standard classification.

With the publication of Norman’s “Tonal Development in Min” (1973), the field of Min dialectology embarked on a new era. For the first time, a proto-Min reconstruction system was introduced. Norman’s article has generated continuous debates on various issues, including the classification of the Shaowu dialect, and the additional tone in Kienyang. However, now that many of these controversies have been resolved, it is time to consider and propose a new reconstruction.

Ting (1979:265, 丁(1979:718) proposed that the Min dialects were probably derived from the main stream of the Chinese language during the Han dynasty, a claim he supported with further phonological evidence in 1983. In the same year, Norman (1979) argued that, based on lexical evidence, the earlierst stratum of the Min dialects could date back to the Han dynasty. This independent convergence in view lends great weight to the hypothesis.

Sung (1973) studied the difference between the literary and colloquial Min reading. Her article was the first attempt to systematically address the issue of linguistic strata in Min. Along the same line, Yang (1982) discovered that there were three strata in the dialect of Chaozhou and only two in Xiamen, Quanzhou, and Zhangzhou. It is important to note that while Norman was concerned with the pure lexical strata of double or triple readings of individual characters, Sung and Yang referred to entire layers of language based upon phonological analysis. In a more recent article, Chang (1996:59-66) argues that the Min dialects have four different layers formed in three time periods.

Ting (1988) suggested that the “Wu” dialect of the Southern Dynasties was the ancestor language of the modern Min dialects, and that the northern dialect of that time has eventually become the modern Wu dialects. He provided two kinds of evidence. The first type pertained to the colloquial substratum in the Wu dialects which showed a unique feature of the Min nature; the second type consisted of dialectal words which were used in the modern Min dialects but which were found in the Nanshi (南史) and the Wuge (吳歌). In connection, Zhou and You (1986:38) developed the idea of studying the origin of the Min dialects from the historical perspective of migration. Norman (1991:336-337) found out that Yang Xiong’s Fangyan and the commentaries by Guo Pu, a scholar in the Jin Dynasty, had preserved a large number of Wu (or Jiangdong) words, a solid piece of evidence which allowed him to assume that the language introduced to Fujian during the Han dynasty was some kind of a southern or Jiangdong dialect. These studies, again, came to the same conclusion, namely, that the modern Min dialects might have derived from the “Wu” dialecs of the Southern Dynasties.

Among the Chinese dialects, Min is a unique group characterized by various phonological and lexical features. As one of the major dialects spoken in Taiwan, the Min dialects have been the focus of research interests and activities. The products made by scholars in mainland China and the United States are euqally fruitful. It is now time to put together a collection of pertinent articles to give acknowledgment to the results of contemporary studies on the Min dialects.

In 1993, UC Berkeley received from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation of International Scholarly Exchange in Taiwan a generous grant to establish the Chao Yuen Ren Center for Chinese Linguistic. It is the purpose of the Center to conduct activities all in honor of this great scholar. Since 1994, as a way to encourage exchange of research experiences and findings, the Center has been organizing annual symposia focusing on different linguistic themes. Each year, a specific topic is identified and invitations for participation are sent to scholars in the United States, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Europe. The second annual symposium highlighted the studies of the Min dialects. The present volume of publication is based essentially upon the presentations delivered at the symposium held at UC Berkeley, in March 1995.

Since the Min dialects were most likely derived from Archaic Chinese of the Han dynasty, they naturally preserved old features no longer found in other dialects. Mei’s article focuses on the origin of several versatile particles in the Southern Min dialect spoken in Taiwn. He compares the dialectal material with both old colloquial data and other Min dialects. The use of some basic vocabularies in Modern Min is in fact a continuation from the Jiangdong dialect of the Southern Dynasties.

Yue’s article deals with the Min translation of Doctrina Chritiana, which was written probably in the last decade of the sixteenth century. She claims that the document consists of three levels of language: the colloquial, the literary vernacular, and the classical. In particular, the colloquial represents vocabulary items and syntactic structures unique to what we identify as the modern Min dialects. Ting (1992) differentiated dialectal history from the history of a dialect region. Yue’s study provides an apt example of how to use a small sample of material to illustrate the dialectal history of Min.

Chen (1993) published an article on the nature of entering-tone words in the Shaowu dialect. He argued that some irregular entering-tone characters had actually been derived from the diminutives. Historically, a final glottal stop was used as an affix to mark the diminutive. The segmental marking eventually rendered these diminutive words indistinguishable from the true entering tone words which always had a glottal stop. When the glottal stop disappeared from the language, the remaining components of both the entering tone words and the diminutives were represented by the same pitch contour. Norman took the surface value of the entering-tone contour of the diminutives in the Shaowu dialect and reconstructed *mh-, *nh-, *lh- in proto-Min, which has been proven to be incorrect. Chen’s current article is a continuation of his previous investigation. By comparing Min with its neighboring dialects. He argues that there are three kinds of diminutives: (1) the suffixal –jian, which is the original form and remains the most popular marker in the language, (2) the suffixal –er, which is introduced from northern Mandarin, and (3) the tonal alternation from which some of the Shaowu entering tone words are derived.

Robert Cheng established a data base entitled “Taiwanese-Mandarin lexicon” few years ago. By using the material in that data base, he is able to study two types of synonyms among pronouns. He discusses the historical origins of the synonyms, and analysis their grammatical, lexical and pragmatic particulars in early texts as well as in the modern dialects. Without the data base, one can hardly have a comlete picture of the pronouns, let alone a close understanding of their phonological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic behaivors.

Y. R. Chao (1968:13) claimed that “it is in matters of grammar that the greatest degree of uniformity is found among all the dialetcs of the Chinese language. Apart from some minor divergence, such as indirect object before direct object in the Wu dialects and Cantonese –for which Mandarin (like English) has the opposite order, and slight differences in the order of the negative in potential complements in some of the southern dialects, and so on, and apart from differences in suffixes and particels for which, however, fairly close equivalents can be set up between dialects, one can say that there is practically one universal Chinese grammar.” In recent studies, scholars have argued that, contrary to Chao’s observations, different dialects do show tremendous divergence in grammar. For instance, Zhu Dexi (1985) illustrated that the interrogative patterns were quite different among dialects. Yue-Hashimoto (1988) provided a comprehensive review of comparative dialect grammar during the last hundred years, and noted the direction for future studies. On the Min dialects, Yang (1991) published a descriptive grammar of the Southern Min dialects in Taiwan, giving us for the first time a complete picture of the language.

Lisa Cheng et al. study the morpheme hoo in the Southern Min dialect spoken in Taiwan, a marker that occurs in the causative, the passive, and the so-called double-object, dative and serial-verb constructions. Using the notion of “secondary predicate,” they offer a formal analysis of the argument structure of hoo that ties these constructions together. Following Chomsky’s approach, they assume that the Null Operator movement creates the secondary predicates. In Mandarin, the most equivalent word to the Min morpheme hoo is gei, which is not used in the causative at all. While it is not the intention of Lisa Cheng et al. to compare Min with Mandarin, their article nevertheless provides another solid example showing that dialectal grammars are not similar.

Lien’s article is a report on the sociolinguistic dimentions of comparative constructions in the southern Min dialect in Taiwan. He focuses on the correlation of the lexical and grammatical aspects of comparative constructions with social variables, including age, sex, education, and place of origin. For the age variable, he distinguishes six age groups, with a ten-year difference between two neighboring groups. For example, Group 1 is from 15 to 24, Group 2 is from 25 to 34, and so on. For the education variable, he divides the subjects into five classes who have attended: (1) primary school or are illiterate, (2) junior high school, (3) senior high school, (4) college, and (5) university. For the place of origin, he distinguishes subjects who are from the Hsinchu area from those who are not. In total he studies 150 subjects. The survey is evidently a large-scale project and most likely the first socialinguistic investigation on any grammatical issue ever conducted in Taiwan to date.

Tai has been working on his theory of iconicity and cognitive-based Chinese grammar for more than a decade. He (Tai 1992) pointed out that Chinese language offered a wealth of data for the study of classifiers and their implications for human categorization. Along the same line, his paper discusses a classifier, bue 53 “tail,” in Southern Min. He observes that the classifier did not exist in the Wei-Jin period when the classifier system had already been fully developed. It seems to have first appeared in the Tang Dynasty. The classifier has been preserved in the most conservative southern dialects only. Its cluster features for the categorization are: (1) animal, (2) long-shaped, (3) with a tail, (4) without legs, and (5) able to crawl or swim.

Chin-chuan Cheng (郑 1994. 1996) made significant contributions to quantitative studies of Chinese dialects and to the methodology of measuring the mutual intelligibility among dialects. Traditionally, dialect subgrouping has no formal means to express the inter-group distance or to illustrate closeness among related dialects. Cheng has designed a method to account for the dialectal correlation and the degrees of mutual intelligibility. For the first time, we have a precise way to express dialect distance on a numerical scale.

Finally, Ting’s paper deals with the reflexes of two Archaic Chinese initials in the Min dialects. He studies newly discovered Min materials, and offers two dinstinctive initials, namely, g and , instead of five as proposed by Norman, to account for proto-Min phonology. The article attempts to resolve one of the long standing problems in Min reconstruction and shows that proposing an alternative reconstruction of a new proto-Min system is possible.

As mentioned above, all the papers collected in this volume are revised versions of the papers presented at the School Annual Symposium of the Chao Yuen Ren Center for Chinese Linguistics. Thanks are due to the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation of International Scholarly Exchange in Taiwan, which provided grants to establish the Center. I want to express my gratitude to Professor William S-Y. Wang, editor of the Journal of Chinese Linguistics, who has kindly consented to publish this volume as one of its monograph series. I am also indebted to Ms. Yifeng Wu, Assistant to the editor of the Journal. Without her timely and enthusiastic assistance, this volume would not appear in this shape now.