Cheng Ming-chung

Abstract

This study targeted to investigate the diminutives of Hakka dialects spoken in Gaopi and Huliao townships in Dapu County, Guangdong. The word list used for the fieldwork survey included 152 common monosyllabic stems. Two speech informants in each township joined the study. They were asked to read the lexical tones, the sandhi tones, and the diminutives in their own dialects. The results are summarized as follows. First, diminutives are formed in the two townships by stems plus diminutive suffixes [(t)ə³¹]. When stems end with [-m, -n, -ŋ, -p, -t, -k], diminutive suffixes will surface as [mə³¹, nə³¹, ŋə³¹, pə³¹, tə³¹, kə³¹]. When stems end with [a], the diminutive suffix emerges as [lə³¹]. Second, two sandhi tones [35/55] occur in Gaopi Hakka, but only one sandhi tone [55] occurs in Huliao Hakka. Both [35] and [55] are not lexical tones in these two Hakka dialects. Third, two diminutive suffixes are used to form diminutives for Yinru stems in Huliao Hakka, and such free variation shows a transitional stage between diminutive suffixes. Fourth, [am, ap] rimes in Gaopi are systematically changed to [aŋ, ak] rimes in Huliao. This change may result from ease of articulation, vowel height, place of nasals, and coda development in Chinese dialects. Fifth, diminutive suffixes in Dapu Hakka undergoes a series of changing stages, that is, [tə⁵⁵]→[(t)ə^55/31]→[(t)ə³¹]. Finally, this study links the results to the diminutives in Dongshi Hakka, and attempts to offer reasonable explanations for the origin of the diminutive tones in Dongshi Hakka.

Keywords: Hakka, diminutive, Dapu, Dongshi