A Special Study On Huizhou Dialect From The Perspective Of Historical Linguistic

This dissertation serves as a“historical dialectology”of Huīzhōu dialect.“The history of Huīzhōu dialect is the least studied one among southern dialects”,while this article tries to combine the extrinsic evidence（migration history）and intrinsic evidence（lexicon and grammar）to explore the evolution history of Huīzhōu dialect.And this endeavor can be characterized into two categories,one is how these six Huīzhōu dialects relate to each other during the history,the other is how to define the development stage of Huīzhōu dialect in the history of Chinese.The first Chapter gives Huīzhōu dialect a literature review,including phonetics and phonology,lexicon and grammar,and then introduces several representative views on the evolution patterns of Chinese dialects,with our comments on the situation of Huīzhōu dialect.The second chapter explores the immigration history of Huīzhōu based on genealogy and local records.The results show that the Wu-speaking area is the most important source of immigrants in Huīzhōu,accounting for 40.4%,while the Tang and Song dynasties are the most concentrated period of immigrants entering Huizhou,accounting for 65.4%.In general,the external evidence of linguistics is compatible with the strata concluded from grammar.Inspired by Mei（1994）,the third Chapter put forward that when studying the history of Chinese lexicon,we also need a reference system similar to Qiēyùn and the grammar of Koine in Tang and Song dynasties,and we define this reference system as“lexicon of Koine in all dynasties”.With the basis of this concept,we do a historical comparative between Jixi,Shexian Shendu,Tunxi Huangdun,Xiuning Wucheng,Yixian Bishan and Qimen county by using 136 lexical items.When doing comparison,we apply the method of historical lexicology and commentariology,put forward a statistical approach which combines the Synchronic Diversity Factor（SDF）and Diachronic Degree of Deviation from the Koine（DDDK）,and this method is defined as Diversity Based Scoring Method（DBSM）.By assigning scores to each dialect,we can get the data for drawing a tree model.The method also attempts to integrate phonological and lexical standards in vertical and horizontal comparisons.Our statistical results show that Yixian dialect is prominent in both SDF and DDDK,and this is in line with its phonological features,which displays many retentions and creations.Shexian Shendu and Qimen share a nearest upper node in the tree model,this is because that both of them are located at the vital communication line and witnessed frequent exchanges of people,as a result,the dialects of Shexian Shendu and Qimen evolves more quickly than other Huīzhōu dialects.Yixian and Qimen are at the two evolutional extremes of Huīzhōu dialect,while Jixi is in the middle of them.The epoch of differentiation of Huangdun and Xiuning is close to each other,but they differ a lot with regard to SDF,which may be derived from the contact with other surrounding dialects in some latter periods.We propose the notion of“early cognates”,their correspondence between dialects is not constrained by the Middle Chinese framework,but to similar tone values and even the same contour patterns.Early cognates are the most convincing evidence to prove relationships between dialects and languages.The early cognates in its essence concern on the“irregular correspondence”and“exceptions”.However,this kind of notion has early been paid attention to in the field of Sino-Tibetan linguistics,and we believe it should also be carried out in the comparative study of Chinese dialects.The article finds that similarly to Min dialect,Huīzhōu dialect should also be divided into the Eastern Huīand the（central-）west Huīviewing from their historical pictures.In order to prove this classification,we list the sixteen words which could differentiate between the Eastern Huīand the（central-）west Huī,and some of them are as follows:“look”,“stand”,“cook”[v],“have”,“don’t have”,“pick up”,“give”,“saw（a log）”,“things”.Besides,we list the characteristic word of the six Huīdialects respectively.We also try to demonstrate that the word“cow”and“wing”in Yixian dialect has a substratum from southern ethnic languages.The fourth chapter concerns the verbal-complement structure,aspect（perfective,durative,iterative）,negative marker and the structural particle.We begin by doing synchronic description and comparison of the six Huīzhōu dialects,and then reflect their development stage in the history of Chinese from the perspective of Chinese historical syntax,to be specific,we give those grammatical phenomena a diachronic interpretation,focusing on the syntactic strata they have.For example,the perfective aspect of Huīzhōu dialect can be divided into five layers:Tang dynasty,Northern Song dynasty to Southern Song dynasty,Southern Song dynasty,Northern Song dynasty to Ming dynasty,after Ming dynasty;and the structural particle four layers:before the Tang dynasty,from the late Tang dynasty to the Northern Song dynasty,from the Southern Song dynasty to the early Yuan dynasty and after the Ming dynasty.Huīzhōu dialect typically use the morpheme qù“go”to express the meaning of iterative,while its durative construction“V₁ zhe V₂”lags behind the development of northern Mandarin,and still retains the syntactic restriction of inserting an object O in“V₁ zhe V₂”that Chinese behaved in Tang and Song dynasties.Based on the immigration history and the discussion in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4,this paper puts forward the view that“Huīzhōu dialect is essentially a conservative old mandarin”.From the perspective of lexicon and grammar,the major layer of Huīzhōu dialect is similar to the development stage of Chinese Koine between the Northern Song dynasty to the early Ming dynasty.In the historical development,the lexicon and grammar of Huīzhōu dialect have been in contact with northern mandarin,and we generalize the three kinds of influences to Huīzhōu dialect brought by this contact:replacement,coexistence and superposition,while superposition dominants.By exploring the lexical and grammatical history of Huīzhōu dialect,we can better understand why professor Lv Shuxiang claims that“modern Chinese belongs to the early-modern Chinese,because both its grammar and common vocabulary are similar to that of early-modern Chinese”.