Abstracts Language, Literature, and Linguistic

Language contact, variation and change: the locative in Xining, Qinghai

by Keith Randall Sean Dede

This dissertation concerns ongoing changes in the dialect of Xining, the capital of Qinghai province. It had been determined that there are two patterns in which the locative construction is manifest in the dialect. Further study reveals that one of the patterns is present in the dialect as the result of contact with non-Sinitic languages. Language contact and a framework in which to interpret the results of language contact are discussed. The contact features found in the Xining dialect are argued to be the result of a linguistic shift. There is evidence to support the argument that part of the shifting community was originally a Monguor language community. Finally, a study of the history of immigration to the region shows that the contact began in the 15th century.In order to further investigate the locative, a field study was carried out in Xining from 1995 to 1996. More than four thousand sentences were gathered from eighty-five informants. The data were analyzed from syntactic and social perspectives. There were correlations between the locative patterns and types of sentences. Sentences containing negative adverbs were found to occur more frequently with the non-Sinitic locative pattern. There were correlations between the social backgrounds of the informants and the patterns in the locative. Informants with a higher educational rank used the non-Sinitic locative pattern less frequently. These correlations are used to support the conclusions that there is an ongoing change in the locative, that the change is syntactically gradual and that the change is due to contact with Standard Chinese.These conclusions are supported by other linguistic variables, including substantive words and function words. These variables are also correlated with social variables. These correlations support the conclusion that contact with Standard Chinese has caused widespread change in the dialect.Finally, the significance of this study for the fields of historical linguistics, language contact and Chinese linguistics is discussed. It is argued that the changes the have occurred in Qinghai are not unique within China, and that there is much to be learned from further study of similar situations in other parts of the country.