Beijing Colloquial Grammar (Morphology Volume)

Author: Zhou Yimin
Publisher:
Publishing 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 was reviewed, it became clear that due to time and resource constraints, completing such an ambitious project was nearly impossible. If one insists on comprehensiveness at the expense of depth, 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, modal particles, interjections, and onomatopoeia. The research methodology and content of this book have the following characteristics:
This book clearly defines the scope of its research, completely excluding written language elements that do not belong to spoken language, focusing on the pure Beijing dialect grammar, including local colloquialisms, as the research subject. This is something that no other comparable grammar works have explicitly stated or truly achieved. In this regard, this book holds pioneering significance, as it practices the ideas advocated by the older generation of grammarians, such as Zhu Dexi and Hu Mingyang, who advocated separating spoken language from written language and studying Beijing dialect separately from Mandarin. During the research process, we extensively drew upon the numerous achievements in Beijing dialect studies from the past decade both domestically and internationally, 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 the goal of quantitative and qualitative analysis. For grammatical phenomena that reflect the characteristics of Beijing spoken language, especially those rarely mentioned or insufficiently explained in other grammar works, we have made every effort to explore them. This is why the 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.
Building on static descriptions, we have attempted to conduct dynamic studies as much as possible 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 the perspectives of phonetics, semantics, and pragmatics. For example, we have revealed the different phonetic variants and functional differences of pronouns, interjections, modal 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 sociolinguistic factors. The book primarily adopts traditional grammar and structuralist analytical methods, and emphasizing practicality over trends is also a distinctive feature of this work. The practical value of this grammar book is multifaceted. It can serve as a textbook for elective courses in linguistics, 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.