Beijing Colloquial Grammar: Lexical Volume

Author: Zhou Yimin
Publisher:
Publish Date: 1998-10-01
Features: Beijing Spoken Grammar is a project under the Beijing Philosophy and Social Sciences "Eighth Five-Year Plan." The original plan was to systematically describe the entire grammar of Beijing spoken language, covering both structure and expression. After the proposal review and some discussions, it became clear that due to time and resource constraints, completing such an ambitious project was nearly impossible. If one insists on being overly comprehensive and grandiose, the resulting work would only be superficial and lack significant value. Therefore, I adjusted the plan accordingly and focused on researching the lexical aspects of Beijing spoken language. After three years of effort, I completed Beijing Spoken Grammar: Lexical Volume, which provides a relatively detailed and comprehensive study of Beijing spoken grammar from a lexical perspective. Beijing Spoken Grammar: Lexical Volume examines 13 lexical categories in Beijing spoken language in 13 chapters: nouns, verbs, adjectives, numerals, measure words, pronouns, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, particles, interjections, exclamations, and onomatopoeia. The research methodology and content have the following characteristics:
This book clearly defines the scope of its research object, completely excluding written language factors that do not belong to spoken language, focusing on the pure Beijing dialect grammar, including local colloquialisms. This is something that no other comparable grammar works have explicitly stated or truly achieved. In this regard, the book holds pioneering significance, as it practices the ideas advocated by the older generation of grammarians, Mr. Zhu Dexi and Mr. Hu Mingyang, who advocated separating spoken and written language for study and distinguishing Beijing dialect from Mandarin.
During the research process, we extensively absorbed the numerous achievements in Beijing dialect studies from both domestic and international fields over the past decade, striving for new breakthroughs on this basis. For closed lexical categories or subcategories, we generally provide exhaustive listings, while for open lexical categories, we meticulously distinguish their different functional/structural/semantic types, thus making significant progress toward quantitative and qualitative analysis. For grammatical phenomena that reflect the characteristics of Beijing spoken language, especially those less mentioned or poorly explained in other grammar works, we have made every effort to explore them. As a result, this book provides valuable materials on Beijing spoken language, which can help scholars of modern Chinese grammar refer to actual usage examples in Beijing spoken language for further exploration or to revise previous conclusions.
Based on static descriptions, we have attempted to conduct dynamic studies through methods such as comparison, substitution, and transformation, revealing many issues that cannot be observed in simple categorical descriptions. We have also paid attention to analyzing grammatical phenomena from phonetic, semantic, and pragmatic perspectives. For example, we have revealed the different phonetic variants and functional differences of pronouns, exclamations, particles, and onomatopoeia. In the study of directional verbs "come" and "go," we employed semantic feature analysis, and we have examined certain pronouns and onomatopoeia from the perspective of social environmental constraints.
The book primarily adopts traditional grammar and structuralist analytical methods, and focusing on practicality rather than trends is also a distinctive feature of this grammar work. The practical value of this grammar book is multifaceted. It can serve as a textbook for elective courses in linguistics programs, a teaching material for foreigners learning Chinese or dialect speakers learning Beijing dialect, and provide references and foundations for the study of modern Chinese grammar and the establishment of modern Chinese standardization norms.