Sinitic nominalisation: microvariation and dialect levelling (漢語方言名詞化的參數和接觸)

A survey of Chinese dialects reveals new degrees of microvariation in the nominal domain as seen in cleft constructions and Activity nominals, as argued by Tang (2011), and although adnominalisers de (的) and ge (個/嘅/个) are roughly distributed between northern and southern dialects respectively, an isogloss can be established which includes various central intermediate mainland dialects as they show divergent behaviour with regards to past-time cleft and Activity constructions. All this leads to a more detailed analysis of microvariation in the Chinese nominal domain where features such as referentiality (+D) and countability/individuality (+count/individual/delimited) can be shown to create a more fine-grained level of microparametric variation.

This was presented (virtually) at the 24th International Conference on Yue Dialects (第二十四届國際粵方言研討會) held at Macau University on the 13th November 2020.