The Synthetic Performances of Teochew

Huang (2015) characterizes “Modern Chinese as a language of high analyticity at multiple levels” and demonstrates “a ranking of relative analyticity among the three dialects: Cantonese > Mandarin > TSM”. This paper argues that Teochew (cháoshànhuà, 潮汕話), another variety of Min, different from TSM, shows more synthetic performances than Mandarin. Chomsky’s “productivity” criterion (1970) helps distinguish lexical operations from syntactic ones. In this spirit, this paper will illustrate its arguments from two perspectives -- lexical and syntactic operations. When it comes to lexical operations, analyses on both the semantic changes within the same categories and the categorial shifts will be made. Besides, syntactic discussions on emphatic inflection, bare classifier phrases, verb-object order and other variants of V-movements in Teochew will also be demonstrated. All analyses will be put under the theoretical framework of generative grammar with the help of a cartography approach. For analyses at the lexical layer, this paper adopts Si’s 司富珍 (2012, 2017a, 2017b, 2018) XW structure, trying to capture the synthesis performances of the Teochew lexicon. As for syntactic operations, the split-CP hypothesis of Rizzi (1997, 2001, 2004) and Rizzi and Bocci (2015), the CL-to-D hypothesis of Simpson (2005), the light verb approach of Chomsky (1995) and the split-light verb hypothesis of Si 司富珍 (2018) will be used as references. Through comparative studies with Mandarin, Cantonese and other languages like English, this paper will conclude that Teochew is a dialect with higher synthesis compared with Mandarin.