Review on Studies of Demonstratives in Chinese Dialects

The papers on the study of demonstratives in Chinese dialects have increased significantly since the beginning of the century. The contents of the study mainly focus on four aspects: the demonstrative system and its characteristics; the usage and source of a special demonstrative; the blurring of demonstratives and their relations to other word classes in meanings, and the classification of the indication distance. However, the deficiency in the researches of single-point dialectal demonstratives still exists. For instance, the research is unbalanced in number, different in details, inadequate in comparison, superficial in the exploration of semantic function and semantic evolution and rare in typological studies. Typological studies on the versatility of demonstratives in Chinese dialects will be a worthy subject.