A Study of Taiwanese Conjunctions and Adverbs and their Changes under Language Contact

• Main Authors: Lee, Shu-Feng, 李淑鳳
• Other Authors: Hsu,Hui-ju
• Format: Others
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/7fmf2j

博士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 台灣文化及語言文學研究所 === 102 === The study will analyze Taiwanese conjunctions and adverbs, and the correlation between conjunctions and adverbs in terms of semantic typology, syntax, and usage, by exploring Taiwanese data during Japanese colonization. We will observe their change and development in modern Taiwanese through their lexical frequency. In the past decades, Taiwanese has had frequent contact with Japanese and Mandarin. The result of language contact usually leads to lexical borrowings. According to Thomason & Kaufman (1988), in the second steps of borrowing scale, or in the beginning of the less frequency of the contact, the conjunctions and adverbs will begin to be borrowed by the target language. Nevertheless, related studies about Taiwanese loanwords have shown few function words. On the other hand, conjunctions and adverbs are actually difficult to distinguish in terms of linguistic fact. Our study shows that they have close relations on the contrary. But,most studies have put more emphasis on how to make a clear cut between them rather than recognizing their close relationship. Thomason & Kaufman’s language contact theory motivated me to studying Taiwanese conjunctions and adverbs in order to find out answers for their relationship of closeness. Results show that Taiwanese conjunctions have a very close relationship with adverbs in that they frequently co-exist and share usage at sentence level to manage meaning. Given the close syntactic relation, we hypothesized that during the process of borrowing they should have developed some degree of correlation during early contact. This could echo Thomason & Kaufman’s theory. In addition, we find that Japanese adverbs and Mandarin conjunctions and adverbs were borrowed into Taiwanese in the early stage of contact. Japanese conjunctions were not borrowed into Taiwanese due to the lack of sharing Chinese characters. Japanese adverbs have been borrowed into Taiwanese and reached its peak in the second decade. Mandarin conjunctions and adverbs were borrowed into Taiwanese continually during the first decade of the Chinese government invasion of Taiwan. There were a competition and a merging between Japanese adverbs and Mandarin conjunctions and adverbs. Generally speaking, Taiwanese conjunctions and adverbs have some changes and develop due to frequent contact with Mandarin. In other words, there is a significant influence of Mandarin. We find that if the Taiwanese counterparts share the same Chinese characters, they have better chances of becoming a frequent usage and hinder the borrowing from Mandarin. Although the words with shared characters have advantage there are exceptions, which were also lost.The literary lexical items have an obvious tendency to become lost, and on the contrary some words are kept because they share the same characters with Mandarin.