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Article published In: Asia-Pacific Language Variation
Vol. 8:1 (2022) ► pp.32–71

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Regional dialect leveling in Mandarin Chinese

The case of locative variation in the Chengdu dialect

 | University of Pennsylvania
Published online: 14 February 2022
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https://doi.org/10.1075/aplv.20004.li
Abstract
This paper studies the variation that stems from language contact between the suffix ‑tou, a locative marker in the Chengdu dialect spoken in Southwest China, and its standard Chinese counterpart ‑mian. The data are drawn from sociolinguistic interviews with 40 native speakers of the Chengdu dialect. It is shown that the standard Chinese form ‑mian has outnumbered ‑tou in terms of occurrence, suggesting a change in progress over apparent time that essentially involves a dialect leveling that results from language standardization and contact-induced convergence. Meanwhile, the two variants undergo certain stylistic reallocation and begin to serve new socio-stylistic roles. To our knowledge, this is the first study that systematically investigates the variation of Chinese locatives.
Abstract (Mandarin Chinese)
本文研究基于语言接触产生的成都话方位词词缀“-头”与普通话中对应“-面”缀之间的变异分布与竞争模式。研究数据来源于对40名成都话母语使用者的社会语言学访谈录音。结果表明，普通话形式的 “-面” 在数量上已经超过 “-头”，体现了基于显象时间的历时演变，即语言均一化。而这种演变从根本上源于语言标准化和语言接触引起的语言趋同。同时，这两种词缀变体经历了一定的文体重新分布，并开始服务于新的文体风格。据笔者所知，本研究是现有文献中首次系统考察汉语方位词词缀变异分布的社会语言学定量研究。
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Chengdu and its language: The social and linguistic background
  • 3.The envelope of variation: Chinese locative markers ‑tou and ‑mian
  • 4.An apparent-time study of (-tou, -mian) variation
    • 4.1Speakers
    • 4.2Data collection
      • 4.2.1Sociolinguistic interview
      • 4.2.2Picture description
      • 4.2.3Question-answering pairs
      • 4.2.4Questionnaire on language attitude
    • 4.3Coding and data analysis
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Change over time and the effects of gender and grammatical function on the change of ‑tou rate
    • 5.2Change of contextual style effect over time
    • 5.3Educational effect on the change of ‑tou rate
    • 5.4The role of language attitude
  • 6.Discussion
    • 6.1Change in progress vs. age-grading
    • 6.2Dialect-to-standard convergence
    • 6.3Morphological reallocation as a result of dialect contact
    • 6.4Gender dynamics in grammatical function
    • 6.5Gender dynamics in language attitude
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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