Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2016, East Asian Languages and Literatures

The Dapeng dialect is a small local dialect spoken by 3,000 to 5,500 speakers in the Dapeng area, Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China. It is a variety derived from a mixture of Hakka and Cantonese, two of the major varieties of Chinese in Southern China. The Dapeng dialect has hitherto received very little attention from Chinese dialectologists and is still under-documented and insufficiently studied. This dissertation is built upon both historical records and first-hand fieldwork data collected in the Dapeng area. It takes the initial step towards an extensive collecting of dialect data and a preliminary analysis of the Dapeng dialect and its usage in the Dapeng community. This dissertation is driven by three particular research goals: 1) conducting a detailed description of the contemporary Dapeng dialect, 2) proposing an account of the formation of the dialect, and 3) assessing the vitality of the Dapeng dialect in its speech community. To achieve the first goal, this dissertation follows the well-established convention of Chinese dialect description, the “dialect report.” While describing the Dapeng dialect, this dissertation also makes frequent reference to Standard Chinese, Middle Chinese, Cantonese, and/or Hakka. Results show resemblance between the Dapeng dialect and the source dialects—both Cantonese and Hakka—and the resemblance to the source dialects pertains to all three major linguistic structures: phonology, lexicon, and syntax. Compared with the Dapeng phonology, which presents a complex hybrid of the two input dialects, the Dapeng lexicon and syntax reflect slightly more similarity to Cantonese. The second research goal is addressed based on the detailed description of the Dapeng dialect. This dissertation demonstrates that Trudgill's (1986) model of “koineization” is best able to account for the formation of the contemporary Dapeng dialect as induced by the Hakka-Cantonese contact. In particular, levelling and simplification are the two m (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Marjorie K.M. Chan (Advisor); Donald C. Winford (Committee Member); Zhiguo Xie (Committee Member) Subjects: Asian Studies; Language; Linguistics; Sociolinguistics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2014, Linguistics

This study is the first in-depth linguistic study of the structure of Anii, a Kwa language spoken by approximately 50,000 speakers. The focus of this work is on verbs, specifically the semantics of temporal and aspectual reference, and on the tonology of verb stems and related markers. A brief overview of the structure of Anii is also provided. The first part of this study describes and formally analyzes temporal and aspectual reference in a variety of Anii clauses. An important background for this analysis is a discussion of Aktionsarten in Anii. The data presented here shows that developing Anii-internal diagnostics for Aktionsarten leads to a better understanding of the role of Aktionsarten in Anii than relying on translations to determine Aktionsarten does. Two important distinctions regarding temporal and aspectual reference in Anii are between perfective and imperfective aspectual reference, and between future and non-future temporal reference. These distinctions are illustrated with clauses not marked with any tense or aspect markers, with imperfective-marked clauses, and future clauses. Other types of clauses are also investigated. For example, 'cee' is a perfect marker. The far-past marker 'bunga', on the other hand, is not a tense or an aspect marker, but rather a Temporal Remoteness Morpheme (TRM) that restricts the eventuality time of a 'bunga'-marked clause such that it must be at least three weeks before the utterance time of that clause. Some other markers are also briefly discussed, to round out the understanding of the semantics of the Anii verb system. The second part of this study investigates tone on verb stems and surrounding markers, including subject markers, noun-class agreement markers, tense-aspect-modality (TAM) markers, and negation markers. Anii has two surface tone levels, high (H) and low (L), but the L tones are the phonetic pronunciation of toneless syllables. The tone-bearing unit in Anii is the mora, and Anii ha (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Judith Tonhauser PhD (Advisor); David Odden PhD (Advisor); Brian Joseph PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: African Studies; Linguistics