On Cycle In Historical Sound Change

In historical linguistics, a set of related changes, in which one phonetic change influences the next one, is called chain shift. There are roughly two sorts of chain shifts, as drag chain and push chain. On the base of chain shift theory, Mr. Xu Tongqiang gave a concept of 'cycle' in his work Historical Linguistics. He pointed out that chain shift may make a phonetic category disappeared recover its form in phonological structure. The sound cycle in this thesis adopts the name Mr. Xu Tongqiang has advanced to this phenomenon for the moment, while the content of it covers a lot of ground. What we are going to discuss involves not only sound cycle in chain shift,but the re-appearance of phonetic phenomenon caused by a variety of reasons.This thesis gives a definition of cycle phenomenon anew and synthesizes more materials to illustrate this topic in every aspect, especially to illustrate the sound cycle led to by other factors except chain shifts. It tries to find out the essential reasons of cycle and the value of it in research of language development.From the angle of sound shift, chain shifts may lead to cycle. For example, the study result on phonetic change of Ningpo dialect by Mr. Xu Tongqiang (1985) indicated the course that pronunciation of some xie she have changed from diphthong into monophthong and then into diphthong again is a cycle caused by push chain.But the reason of phonetic cycle is very complicated. There are lots of ways of phonetic cycle. In many cases, it is not caused by chain shift, just as the appearance of '-m' coda is not from xian she, shen she in the Middle time. It is the result that '-n' coda and '-η' coda of zhen she, zeng she, geng she, tong she ke kou labialized because of fronting of head vowel [u] and strengthening of bilabialized effect. Another example is onsets zhi xi, zhao xi in Shanxi dialect. Onsets of zhi xi, zhao xi have experienced a stage of thorough expansion. The onsets in modern dialect of some places in Shanxi diverged again. It is a course of cycle from divergence to mergence then to divergence anew. But the new phonetic situation and previous cine have no same origin. It shows that cycle is not a mere repetition of the past.Sound cycle caused by factors beyond chain shift takes shape after many complicated changes by sorts of forces functioning together. The sort of cycle comes...