More on the Morphological Typology of Sinitic

Abstract

Chinese is often defined as a ‘textbook example’ of an isolating language, with comparatively few affixes that are usually etymologically transparent (Sagart 2004). After ‘deconstructing’ the notion of the isolating morphological type, I shall discuss data from a number of Chinese dialects spread over the Shanxi, Shaanxi, Henan, Hebei, and Shandong provinces. I will show that there seem to be some areal clusters with productive morphological phenomena not expected to occur in isolating languages, which can be explained both by the cross-linguistically widespread tendency towards the reduction of certain items in speech production and, arguably, by processes of convergence among dialects. (This article is in English.) 提要 學者們通常認為漢語是典型的孤立語，詞綴較少，由來知根知底 (Sagart 2004)。本文首先對孤立語的概念進行“解構”。接著，基於山西、陝西、河南、河北以及山東方言的語料，說明漢語方言中似乎存在著地域上成片的具有能產性的形態現象，而這種現象似乎不該出現在孤立語中。本文認為，產生這類形態現象的動因包括語法化標記語音侵蝕的普遍傾向以及方言之間的互相影響。