The Long Sound Structure In Wuhan Dialect

There are some long sound structures in the old Wuhan dialect. After inspection of some typical structure, we have reached the following understandings: the long sound structure is a kind of mutation in the phonetic level. Structure has undergone the following changes, such as the extension of major vowel;the weakening of coda;even the sound reducing and the sound combining. We have discovered that these mutations are controlled by the prosodic rules. The words which have the long sound structure are adjectives related to people's feeling and consciousness;Verbs related to people's psychological activities;nouns related to people's possession relationship. Word rootsand complements in the long sound structures have the grammatical meaning------advanced and deep degree, which shows a strong subjective evaluation, and the whole sentence expressed a already happened incident.After speculating the long sound structures in other dialects, we have discovered that the long sound structures in Wuhan dialect are state words, which are similar to the state words of ABB and AABB form. Long sound structure in the sentences generally serves as predicate, complement, and attributive. "le(了) " in the long sound structure is indispensable while "de (的) " in it is at random according to the need of prosodic. The pragmatic function of long sound structure is to achieve the speech acts of evaluation and expression. In the three typical long sound structure, "XY: le (了) de (的)" takes the first and the development of the other two are on the basis of it. Because the long sound structure is no longer expressed in the new Wuhan dialect, we can forecast that the structure will gradually died in the Wuhan dialect.