Investigation On The Railway Of Shangrao Railway In Jiangxi Province

At present, the scholars in Chinese dialectology have already achieved fruitful results on the research and investigation of Chinese dialects, especially of dialect islands. However, the research on road dialects and the emerging industrial community dialects is still at the primary stage now. Shangrao railway dialect is a perfect case of road dialects and the emerging industrial community dialects. Moreover, Shangrao railway dialect is also of great value to the research on language contact, language variation and Koineization.This thesis includes nine chapters. The first chapter is the preface of this paper, which is mainly about the domestic and international research results related to this paper, the significance of the research topic, and the innovation point of this paper.The second chapter introduces the background of Shangrao railway dialect, which includes geographical location, available regions, formation history, source of population, age stratification, and language attributes, etc.The third chapter is mainly about phonological system of Shangrao railway dialect, which is composed of initials, rhymes and tones.Given that exceptions of phonetic change are of great importance to language contact and language variation, chapter four investigates the rules of initials of Shangrao railway dialect and its exceptions, and the latter is the emphasis of this chapter. Chapter five does research on the rules of rhymes of Shangrao railway dialect and its exceptions, especially on the exception of glottal stop merging and dropping. The research of chapter four and chapter five are based on the initials and rhymes of mediaeval Chinese.In the view of the fact that language comparison is also an important wreath in the research of language contact and language variation, chapter six, chapter seven and chapter eight compare Shangrao railway dialect with Hangzhou dialect and Shangrao downtown dialect. Chapter six is a phonetic comparison of the three dialects, which includes the comparison of initials, rhymes, tones and exceptions of phonetic change, and the conclusion is that Shangrao railway dialect is close to Hangzhou dialect while distant from Shangrao downtown dialect. Chapter seven is a vocabulary comparison of the three dialects, which is composed of the comparison of200words, content closed words (kinship words, time words and body words), and characteristic words (characteristic words of Shangrao downtown dialect and Hangzhou dialect), and the conclusion is that most of common words in Shangrao railway dialect were replaced by mandarin, but as for systematic words and characteristic words, Shangrao railway dialect was much more influenced by Shangrao downtown dialect rather than Hangzhou dialect. Chapter eight is a grammar comparison of the three dialects, which involves of lexical comparison and syntactic comparison, and the conclusion is that Shangrao railway dialect is close to Shangrao downtown dialect while distant from Hangzhou dialect.Chapter nine takes Shangrao railway dialect as an example to discuss the types of language contact and Koineization. Moreover, this chapter put forward a basic frame of Shangrao railway dialect contacting with other dialects:"Vocabulary> Grammar> Phonology", that is, when there is language in contact, vocabulary is most likely to be replaced by other languages, grammar next, and phonology at last. As for the borrowing scale in subsystem, common words’ borrowing is easier than basic words (content closed words and characteristic words), and lexical borrowing is easier than syntactic borrowing.