EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

Section 1 21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 23 divided to constative and performative part, with “final” formulaic phrases belonging to the latter. I first offer division of these inscriptional “performances” on medium-dependent and medium-independent, and proceed with a more detailed taxonomy. Finally, I use inscriptions referring to the ancestors by riming and shihao as a sample to demonstrate how the proposed taxonomy can contribute to the diachronic study of the development of the conception of bronze inscriptions as media of communication, and discuss some further implications for the study of Western Zhou history. Song Na (INALCO/CRLAO) Preposition ‘thou22 投 ’ in Temporal Relation of Two Events in Baoding Dialect and Its Etymology Key words: thou22 投 , preposition, temporal relation, semantic change, aspect,etymology, Baoding dialect, Standard Mandarin This paper set out to examine a prepositional structure ‘thou22+V’meaning ‘previously to the time when’ in Baoding dialect (a Mandarin dialect of the Jilu subgroup, spoken 140 km south of Beijing). Prepositions, postpositions and circumposition are all the types of adpositions (Greenberg 1995,1980) to express the spa- tial or temporal relations. While Standard Mandarin usually use the postpositional structure with a localizer qián 前 which is originally nominal: ‘V+ qián 前 / zhiqián 之前 ’ or a circumposition ‘zài 在 …zhiqián 之 前 ’ to express the same meaning. This study focuses on the distribution of thou22 in Baoding dialect. The aspectual features of the verb in ‘thou22+V’will be also examined. Our analysis is based on the comparison with Standard Mandarin to show that the use of thou22 is more restrictive in Baoding dialect than qián 前 or zhiqián 之前 in standard mandarin. Contrary to standard mandarin, in ‘thou22+V’, V cannot take any aspect marker or negative elements. Moreover, only controllable events can be accepted.In the end, as far as the etymology of thou22 is concerned, we try to give a preliminary explanation to the related issue: we think that the orignal character of ‘thou22’ in Baoding dialect could be 投 meaning ‘to throw, to cast’, but not 头 ‘head’ as claimed by Wu Jizhang (2012) in the description of dialects in Hebei province, in which Baoding is located. ‘thou22’ in Baoding dialect confirms that the semantic changes of 投 from the original verbal meaning ‘to throw, to cast’ to the spatial meaning ‘to have a short stay after a travel’, and then a projection from spatial to the temporal meaning. The temporal use of 投 can be traced back to Han dyansty (25–220AD). (Jiang Shaoyu 2006) References: 1. Greenberg J(1980) Circumfixes and typological change 2. Greenberg J (1995) The diachronic typological approach to language 3. 蒋绍愚 (2006) “投”的词义分析和词义演变,《语言暨语言学》专刊外编之六 4. 吴继章 (2012) 普通话里表示时间的”名/动/小句+前/后”在河北方言中的对应表达方式 Vol.15.174–187, 中 国语言学报 Tsankova Antonia (Sofia University ) Correlational Analysis of the Factors Influencing the Explication of Aspect-tense Markers in Modern Chinese Key words: aspect-tense markers, variation, correlational analysis The study presents a statistical account of the influence of basic linguistic factors for the usage of the markers 了 , 过 , 着 in Modern Chinese. The set of relevant factors include semantic and syntactic properties of predicate and argument, sentence type, speech mode, discourse position, and the aspect-tense meaning expressed by the phrase. An experimental text with 1062 potential positions of aspect-tense marking was surveyed among 20 native speakers in order to assess the degree of variability in the intuitive choice of the markers. The analysis through multiple regression (SPSS) on correlation models, combining values of the factors under study proved that: