Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Between Verb And Preposition: Diachronic Stages Of Coverbs In Mandarin Chinese, Glynis Jones

Masters Theses

Mandarin Chinese has long been known to possess a category of words known as ‘coverbs’ in the literature, which sit in the gray area between verb and preposition. Li and Thompson (1974) describe the historical origins of Mandarin coverbs to be full transitive verbs, despite their modern state being decidedly less verbal. They also note that coverbs are a non-homogenous class. This thesis works to establish categories of coverbs in Mandarin Chinese and their distance from true verbhood in order to understand the diachronic shift that coverbs are currently undergoing before our very eyes. I will draw on the work …

Dialects Into Films----The Element Of “Dialect” In Chinese Films, Shun Yao

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

In recent years, using dialects in Chinese films has become more and more popular. By observing this phenomenon and investigating its history, I find out three functions that dialect has in cinema: severing as fun maker, indicating the identity of the speaker, helping to describe the speaker’s characteristics.

In order to understand why dialects have these functions in cinema, semiotic analysis and discourse analysis are employed in finding the reasons.