Demonstratives and Demonstrative Phrases in Lianhua Gan:Synchronic Description and Diachronic Reconstruction
This paper examines the properties of demonstratives and demonstrative phrases in Li-anhua Gan from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives.There are three basic demonstratives:[ku35],[kuε35]and[kõ35].Among them,[kuε35]and[kõ35]can refer to locations and also persons/objects;[ku35]can be used as a proximal demonstrative and also a neutral demonstrative that does not encode the distance contrast.Besides the commonly used demonstrative phrase of"DemDet-Cl-N"across Chinese,Lianhua Gan also employs the definite locational attributive structure of"DemLoc-[ku]-Cl-N".Different from the direct way of the former phase,the latter structure indirectly refers to a person/object by specifying the location where the person/object is situated.These synchronic states are the result of subsequent diachronic development.Both old and new uses of different diachronic stages remain in modern Lianhua Gan,making the synchronic demonstrative system quite complicat-ed.This paper aims to explore cross-dialectal/cross-linguistic similarities and differences of the devel-opment of demonstratives on the basis of the full understanding of the demonstrative system of Lian-hua Gan,and to provide a case study to illustrate the relationship between the synchronic description and diachronic reconstruction as well as that between studies on a specific dialect and cross-dialectal/cross-linguistic comparative studies.
Gan dialectdemonstrativesynchronic descriptiondiachronic reconstruction
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