Date of Award

August 2024

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Linguistics

First Advisor

Garry Davis

Committee Members

Anne Pycha, Hamid Ouali, Joyce Tang Boyland, Glenn Starr

Keywords

Contact linguistics, Sinitic languages, Syntax, Taiwan Mandarin

Abstract

Previous accounts of Taiwan Mandarin syntax have generally taken a sociolinguistic approach, ascribing the presence of non-Mandarin-like features and patterns to interference from Taiwanese Southern Min or other southern varieties of Chinese. However, this approach has two major flaws. Firstly, it fails to explain the existence of patterns in Taiwan Mandarin that are unique to that dialect and the absence in Taiwan Mandarin of patterns that exist in both Standard Mandarin and Taiwanese Southern Min. Secondly, the focus on presence-absence as a binary has obscured important information about the frequency and distribution of various grammatical constructions. In order to address these shortcomings, I propose to reanalyze Taiwan Mandarin syntax from the perspective of a version of Replication Theory (Heine & Kuteva 2005) that has been modified to incorporate ideas from the field of World Englishes. Replication Theory is built around the premise that, in language contact situations, speakers notice when grammatical structures in the two languages are conceptually similar and create new usage patterns on the basis of those similarities. What World Englishes contributes to this framework is, firstly, the founder principle (Mufwene 1996), that is, the idea that the structural features of a contact language are dependent on those of the dialects spoken by the people actually involved in the contact situation. Since it is highly unlikely that the Mainlanders who fled to Taiwan in 1949 spoke Standard Mandarin, the founder principle requires that that dialect not be used as a point of reference in discussions about Taiwan Mandarin. Secondly, the language ecology concept of the feature pool (Mufwene 2001) posits that learners create their own idiolects by selecting features present in the speech of those they interact with. At a community level, this means that the features of all language varieties involved in a contact situation are available for selection, though certain features may be more or less likely candidates depending on how much of the population uses them and whether they are reinforced by- or competing against features from other language varieties. Thus, northern Taiwan, where most of the Mainlanders settled, should have had a stronger Mandarin presence in its feature pool that central or southern Taiwan. Combining these ideas with Replication Theory, I predict that Taiwan Mandarin will not have Standard Mandarin features that are unusual or absent in other varieties of Mandarin, that diachronic analysis will show that features attributed to interference from Taiwanese Southern Min are in fact replica grammaticalizations and not polysemy copies, and that these features will be more grammaticalized in the speech of those from southern Taiwan than those from the north. Using data from both the existing literature and corpora of spoken Taiwan Mandarin collected in the 1980s, early 2000s, and early 2020s, I argue that this extended Replication Theory better explains the syntax of Taiwan Mandarin than previous approaches.

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