郁孙豪 唐律铭
吴方言和近代文献中，代词时常附带前缀“是”以表达某种强调。该前缀的意义为何、如何形成，目前仍不明确。而吴方言中较保守的高淳话（宣州片-太高小片）存在一个功能相近的附着词，或可从中窥知前缀“是”的早期面貌。句法上，附着词“是”仅前附于体词性成分，不得进入小句内，只能构成出位结构；语义上，“是”的主干必须有定，且已激活。这显示附“是”短语与话题十分相似，而根据其语篇表现可得：附“是”成分是听者当前没在关注但言者有意使之关注的。从功能主义的角度看，高淳话等吴语应是由于“话题-说明”结构发达，加之话题、前置焦点等多种篇章成分都由出位结构表示，无专门的形态标记相区分，故以此类手段辨别语篇功能不同的各类出位成分。Wu Chinese and its neighboring dialects feature a distinct set of “emphatic personal pronouns”, a feature not commonly found in most other Chinese languages. These emphatic pronouns typically include the prefix zeh (是) and are believed to convey a sense of “discourse prominence”. This paper investigates the functional nature and historical roots of this unique morphologicalpragmatic phenomenon by examining the proclitic zeh in the Gaochun dialect of Wu Chinese, representing an earlier stage of this pronominal prefix. Given Wu Chinese’s status as a highly “topicprominent” language lacking a specialized topic marker, it heavily relies on “leftdislocation” to fulfill various discourse roles, such as topics, contrastive topics, preposed focus, and other syntactically preposed constituents without specific discourse functions. Functionally, it is argued that the proclitic zeh in the Gaochun dialect serves as a strategy to differentiate different types of leftdislocated constituents by emphasizing topicalitynewness, thereby directing the listener’s attention to its nominal host. This argument is supported by the following evidence: syntactically, phrases containing this proclitic must be dislocated, resembling a topic; and semantically, it only combines with familiaritybased definites, including personal pronouns, determiner phrases, and definite classifier phrases, while excluding indefinites or uniquenessbased definites. However, unlike a topic, phrases containing zehcannot denote entities currently capturing the listener’s attention, and they distinguish focus, newtopics, and contrastive topics from given topics, which are pragmatically presupposed. Furthermore, these observations in the Gaochun dialect align with those of emphatic pronouns in other Wu Chinese dialects dialectal variants and early Mandarin as documented in historical literature. Therefore, the interplay between this distinctive form of reference and topic structure may elucidate many similar phenomena across Chinese languages.
