A study on the semantics and compounding of Southern Min chêng

According to Southern Min dictionary edited by Dong (2001), the meanings and the examples of chêng are listed in the following table: meaning Examples ago chìn-chêng, chá-chêng, chêng-chi t-mî Face, front thâu-chêng, heng-chêng, chhùchêng Ahead, beforehand s chêng former chêng-pái Ex-(wife) chêng-lâng-kiá , chêng-bó, chêng-ang future chiân-tô fore chêng –nî senior chiân-pòe near bo k-chêng, gán-chiân, b n-chêng, b n-thâu-chêng Based on the Southern Min dialect spoken in Taiwan (the corpus adopted from Ún-giân ê tai-gi-bun homepage http://203.64.42.tur21/iug/Ungian/ungian.asp), we’ll explore the frequency of each semene of chêng, the relation between the semantics and the different structures of compounds composed by chêng, and the competition of synonyms. There are three issues discussed in the paper: (1) based on nominal element collocated with chêng, the semantic development of chêng follows the path proposed by Heine et al 1991; (2) the meaning of qian varies with different position in a compound, e.g. chêng-sa kang ‘the previous three days’ and sa kang-chêng ‘three days ago’ share the same morphemes, but have different order, and therefore have different meanings; (3) According to the layering principle proposed by Hopper (1991:22): “new layers continually emerging. As this happens, the older layers are not necessarily discarded, but may remain to coexist with and interact with the newer layer”. The interaction and competition of different layers appear in the two sets of (near-)synonyms, i.e. bo k-chêng, gán-chiân and ba k-chiu-chêng ‘now’ and thâu-chêng, b n-chêng and b n-thâu-chêng ‘front’.