Readers 读者
The Old and New Grammar of Synonyms among Pronouns in Taiwanese
(in Chinese)
台、华词库中的代名词句法、词法、语用、语音信息同义语的来源及古今语法
Robert Cheng 郑良伟
Abstract 摘要
The paper discuss two types of synonyms among pronouns: (1) those between three types of memory units, lexicon, morphological pattern, and regular syntactic structure, and (2) those between different language layers, pronouns with morphemes of old layer, new layer, and mixture of old and new. Quite a few pronouns as lexical entries are from the old layer in terms of colloquial reading or unclear etymology (e.g. lang5 ‘other’ lan2 ‘we inclusive’) or old day grammar (D-N chit-tah ‘here’; pat8-lang5 ‘other’). Function words used in regular syntax tend to be from the new layer *e.g. ki5-tha-e5 N, hou7-siong7 + VP). Function words in pattern tend to come from the old layer, whereas the content words can be from new or old. (sio-V, tak8-M).
The paper discusses the sources of synonyms, historical study of etymons in earlier Chinese character texts, and grammatical analysis of modern texts as well as the spoken language. Problems presented include: reference to the speaker and address by honorific and humble terms, the self-other pronouns, in addition to the first and second person pronouns; semantic classification of pronouns, of ‘self-other’ and ‘same-different’; different use of Chinese characters for Taiwanese morpheme, in earlier texts and modern ones.
All these concern the thorny problems of providing the syntactic, semantic, programmatic and phonological information to the Pronouns as entries in a Taiwanese Mandarin lexicon.