On the nature of Hangzhou Dialect from Grammatical Perspectives

With its predecessor almost totally overridden by the erstwhile Mandarin in the South Song Dynasty,today's Hangzhou dialect sees itself with some grammatical features typical of Wu group,i.e.topic prominence,certain reduplications and the so-called ' objects preceding complements' ordering.Besides some superficial Mandarin remnants,such as the personal pronouns wo 我/ni 你/tamen 他们 and the quantifier duoshao 多少(how many/much),the suffix er JL,and the V-neg-V questions,etc.,Mandarin hardly left its traits behind.Similar is true for its phonetic scenario.These can be simply accounted for in geographical terms that Hangzhou is surrounded by the Wu Dialects proper,with a considerable number of Hangzhou residents having migrated from the adjacent Wu dialectal regions like Shaoxing,which means that Hangzhou Dialect might have gradually dissociated itself from the northern dialects and merged into Wu Dialect after the Yuan Dynasty,and eventually,evolved into Wu Dialect instead of Koine.