Abstract
Temporal words with the meaning of a short period refer to those which occupy a short period in the time span. In Taiwan Southern Min dialects such words include ＂tsit e (a), tsit si (a), tsit kun (a), tsit mah nih (a)＂ etc., and they share the same morphological form ＂tsit+X+(a)＂. This essay explores the semantic features and syntactic distributions of these temporal words in daily narratives based on the analysis of the corpus. The analysis shows that these temporal words from different origins have different syntactic distributions and semantic development; ＂tsit+X＂ with the diminutive ＂-a＂ and the one without ＂-a＂ appear in ＂VP+ tsit X, VP+ tsit X＂ and ＂tsit X a+VP, tsit X a +VP＂, respectively, and the lexicalization of ＂tsue + tsit+X+(a)＂ or ＂tsit+X+(a)+ku＂ is still restricted by their original meaning.