A Dialect Tone Test Of Yongzhou And Chenzhou City

Yongzhou city and Chenzhou city are located in the south of Hunan province, Yongzhou dialect and Chenzhou dialect are the representative dialect of Xiangnan Mandarin, which is a sub-dialect of South-west Mandarin. Up to now, there are not so much information about the two cities'dialect. The researchers before got the primary production by using the traditional methods such as hearing and noting.But the results of these traditional researches were quite different. In this article, we will use the experimental phonetics method to collect and process acounstic data such as F0 and duration, and tone value and duration of mono-syllable tone will be determined through Fo and duration normalization. After getting the tone value, we will compare them with the results of traditional dialectology to resolve differences of the two cities'dialect.This thesis is divided into five chapters, The first chapter is the Introduction, which is mainly describing the research purposes, meanings, methods and steps and summarizing the history and the present experimental research of Chinese tone, the present research of Yongzhou dialect and Chenzhou dialect. The second chapter describes the preparation, process and methods of experimental phonetics method. The third chapter and the fourth chapter study the F0 and duration of mono-syllable tone in Yongzhou dilect and Chenzhou dialect. The experiment obtains the mono-syllable tones'value of Yongzhou dialect and Chenzhou dialect. Yinping's tone value of Yongzhou dialect is 22, Yangping's tone value is 22,Shangsheng's tone value is 55, Qusheng's tone value is 15. Yinping's tone value of Chenzhou dialect is 34, Yangping's tone value is 41, Shangsheng's tone value is 52, Qusheng's tone value is 213. The tone values obtained by our experimental research are very different from the traditional dialectology and we analysis the reasons. The final chapter concludes the paper's overall conclusions, the main innovation points and the shortcomings.The results of Yongzhou dialect experimental tone research showed the Yingping ang Yangping tone were combined into one. We conducted a social survey of this combination of tone and we found that the combination was just in the early stage, because there is only about 1/3 part of Yinping and Yangping tone have combined into one, and the differences between different age groups are small in the combiation, which informs the process of this combination is quite slow.we believe the main reason of this combination is that they have very familiar tone value. In addition, we assume that the combination of Yingping and Yangping tone in Yongzhou dialect may be an evolutional trend of South-west Mandarin tones.