The semantic field SHARP in Chinese, its diachronic development and reflexes in modern dialects

Liliya Kholkina (Institute of Linguistics of the Russian State University for the Humanities (Moscow); kholkina.liliya@yandex.ru); Lyudmila Nanij (Institute of Linguistics of the Russian State University for the Humanities (Moscow); naniilu@yandex.ru); Si Qiang (Huizhou University (PRC); chanceqq@126.com)

Journal of Language Relationship, № 20/3-4, 2022 - p.280-298

Abstract: In this paper, we present a detailed analysis of the semantic field SHARP in Chinese in the diachronic aspect. The analysis uses typological data of the Moscow Lexico-Typological Group (MlexT) for the adjectives denoting the physical properties of objects, as well as data from dictionaries, corpora, thesauri, and the results of a survey of native speakers of Chinese dialects. The study shows that the structure of the semantic field SHARP in Chinese changed over time, but never violated the basic principles defined by MlexT for this field. At the same time, a certain correlation was found between the structures of the field SHARP in modern Chinese dialects and the structures of this field in different diachronic periods of the Chinese language: more archaic features are preserved in the South, and later ones in the North.

Keywords: Chinese dialects, diachronic linguistics, semantic field, lexical typology, semantics of ‘sharpness’

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