Description and Comparison: Habitual Aspect in Lianjiang Yue Dialect (in Chinese)

Abstract

In Lianjiang Yue dialect, the auxiliary verb “guan1” and the aspect particle “guan2”, which place before and after verbs respectively, refer to habitual meaning. By investigating these two words, we find that in Lianjiang Yue dialect, Guigang Yue dialect and Hakka dialect, “guan” has grammaticalized from descriptive complement to habitual particle, while in Guangzhou dialect “guan” has not evolved in this way. The habitual particle in Guangzhou dialect is “kai”. There are two paths of grammaticalization for the habitual particles in Chinese dialect. One is from descriptive complement to habitual aspect (such as “kai” in Guangzhou dialect, and “guan2” in Lianjiang dialect), while the other is from verb to auxiliary verb (such as “guan1” in Lianjiang Yue dialect). Auxiliary verbs, descriptive complements and aspect particles referring to habitual meaning all fall into the habitual category, and they are important to the study of the habitual category in Chinese. In this paper, we examine the postverbal “guan” in Lianjiang Yue dialect within the “static– dynamic” framework of dialectal grammar research, studying its current usage as well as its evolvement. This is