| Shuidongjiang Town is located in the eastern suburbs of Shaodong County,Shaoyang City,Hunan Province,bounded on the northeast by Shuangfeng County,Loudi City and bordering Hengyang County,Hengyang City in its east.Over the years,the attribution of Shuidongjiang dialect involves the issue of Xiang Dialect's zoning.The different conclusions such that it bel'ongs to Lou-Shao Dialect District,Chang-Yi Dialect District or Hengzhou Dialect District have been raised by many scholars.In order to ascertain the details of Shuidongjiang Dialect and clarrify the relationship of the regional dialects,the study has researched the phonetic system of Shuidongjiang Town comprehensively according to Questionnaire of C.haracters for Dialect Surveys,and studies the phenomena of characters,variant pronunciation,evolution through ages,and tonal sandhi,changing the situation that the phonetic study of Shuidongjiang dialect is not systematic.On this basis,the researcher compared the dialects of 10 villages that belong to 3 counties respectively,which has given a comprehensive description of the Xiang Dialect of transitional districts in the Chinese linguistics community for the first time.At the same time,it provides materials for the scrutiny of Xiang Dialect.Through analysing the distinctive feature,concluding the similarities,the study has been trying to expose the reasons for forming such a complicated dialectal phenomenon,and explore the regional division of Xiang Dialect.The thesis consists of 8 chapters:Chapter 1:introduction.It mainly introduces the geography,history,culture and usage of dialects.It also include present study of Shuidongjiang dialect.Chapter 2:it adequately describes the dialect's phonetic system,presents 41 initials,33 finals,6 tones of Shuidongjiang dialect and their matching relation.Chapter 3:variant pronunciation of Chinese characters.It describes the phenomena in terms of initial,final and tone,which reflects in the following three aspects:literary and colloquial readings,old and new pronunciation,other multi-pronunciations of a Chinese character.Moreover,it summarizes the most important rules.Chapter 4:it compares the phonetic system of Shuidongjiang dialect with that of Qie Yun,exploring the correspondence of initial consonants,rhyme groups,four tones of level and oblique between middle Chinese and current Shuidongjiang dialect.It also analyses the evolution tendency.Chapter 5:it firstly describes the 23 types of tones sandhi in Shuidongjiang dialect's double characters groups,which include 5 kinds of groups that the former characters' tones have changed,16 kinds of groups that the latter characters' tones are modified,2 kinds of groups that both characters' are differ from their original appearance.Then,it summarizes the similarity of transformation,and analyses reasons from pure phonetic perspective.Chapter 6:it investigates the differences of dialectal phonetic systems by subject between Shuidongjiang Town and neighboring towns.As to initial,it focus that voiced consonants devoicing,the groups of '?' and '?' mixed reading,the pronouncing interflow of'?' group and '?'group,the distinction of '?','?' and'?' groups,the mixed usage of labio-dental fricative in '?' and '?'groups.As to finals,it emphatically explors the finals' various appearence of middle Chinese checked tone,the interflow of rhyme group and the change of main vowels and head vowels in rhyme groups in these areas.In the aspect of tones,it specifically studies the difference in these towns in terms of falling-rising tone,falling tone and checked tone.Chapter 7:on the basis of previous chapter,it divedes these towns to different dialect districts,the geography and history with considered.It also analyses the reasons for causing the pronuncing differentiation or mixture according to the theory of dialetal contact.Last part:peroration.It states all the constructive discovery briefly in the thesis.Besides,there are 2 appendices which include homophone table of Shuidongjiang dialect and comparison table of dialectal pronunciation at the end of the thesis.In summary,the mainly dicoveries of the study include:(1)there are coupled antithetical initials between voiceless consonants and voiced consonants in the Shuidongjiang dialect,but the voiced consonants of checked tones have devocalized more than half.(2)there are a group of palatal consonants such as[c ch J ? c j].(3)rhyme tail of oral consonants have disappeared,yet the vowels of finals are antithetical between rhyme of Rusheng and Yangsheng,which are the conceptions refering to finals with rhyme tail of oral consonants or nasal consonants in Middle Chinese.(4)the fall-rising tones have evolved different tones caused by airstream of breath.(5)the checked tones have assimilated into un-checked tones.(6)the dialects of Shuidongjiang Town,Baomianqian Town,Yangqiao Town in Shaodong County and Huamen Town in Shuangfeng County belong to Old Xiang Dialect,though they are not part of the same dialect district.On the contrary,the dialect of Jinlan Town in Hengyang County belongs to New Xiang Dialect. |
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