A Phonological Investigation Of The Asymmetrical Mutual Intelligibility Between Northern And Southern Wu Dialects

This dissertation presents a pioneering study of a systematic phonological analysis of the asymmetrical mutual intelligibility between northern Wu and southern Wu, respectively represented by the Wenzhou dialect and the Wujiang dialect.As one of the ten major dialects in China, Wu is second only to Mandarin. It is widely held by scholars that there exists a yawning gap in mutual intelligibility between the sub-dialects in northern Wu and southern Wu. Yet few phonological researches have yet been made regarding this unintelligibility, let alone those from the perspective of markedness of phonological structures.Mutual intelligibility between dialects is determined by various factors, including social factors and linguistic ones. The latter can be phonetic, phonological, lexical or/and syntactic. Based on the assumption that mutual intelligibility between dialects is first and foremost due to their phonological structures, the dissertation makes a mutual intelligibility test between the five sub-dialects of Wu and a systematic comparison between the Wenzhou dialect, a southern Wu, and the Wujiang dialect, a northern Wu, in terms of their phonological structures, including surface and underlying inventories, underlying contrastive features, syllabic phonotactics and tonal system. Through these analyses, this dissertation tries to explore the phonological mechanisms behind the link between the varied degree of markedness of the phonological structures and the asymmetry of intelligibility between a southern Wu and a northern Wu. In so doing, this dissertation is supposed to be able to verify the following hypotheses:Hypothesis1:Mutual intelligibility between dialects and asymmetry of intelligibility between dialects is in a great measure related to their phonological structures.Hypothesis2:Mutual intelligibility between dialects is in reverse proportion to markedness of their phonological structures. That is, the stronger the markedness of their phonological structures, the weaker the intelligibility. The mutual intelligibility test by means of traditional transcription (dictation) of the five regions speaking Wu reveals a hierarchy of intelligibility as follows:the Huangyan dialect≈the Wujiang dialect> the Quzhou dialect≈the Yongkang dialect> the Wenzhou dialect. The test also testifies to the prevalence of asymmetry of intelligibility between dialects. This dissertation takes as its object of study two of the five dialects with the greatest asymmetry of mutual intelligibility, namely, the Wenzhou dialect and the Wujiang dialect, and treats them as representatives respectively of sub-dialects in southern Wu and those in northern Wu.Drawing upon researches on Wu, particularly literature on phonetic description of the Wenzhou dialect and the Wujiang dialect, we intend to make clear the phonological system of the two dialects by revealing the underlying inventories of consonants and vowels, the specification of contrastive features, syllabic phonotactics as well as tone sandhi rules. Based on these phonological analyses, this dissertation intends to explain the asymmetry of intelligibility between the two dialects from the perspective of difference in markedness of the two dialects, and to find the key phonological causes resulting in the low intelligibility of the Wenzhou dialect.The present study conducts a systematic analysis of the phonological structures of the Wenzhou dialect and the Wujiang dialect under a combined framework of the new theory of markedness (de Lacy2002,2006) and the Contrastive Hierarchy Theory (Dresher2002,2003,2009). De Lacy (2002,2006) focuses on competence (or i-language) markedness and proposes a general theory based on the following principle ideas:1) Markedness is part of grammatical competence;2) There exist multiple markedness hierarchies, which may sometimes come into direct conflict with each other;3) The conflicts among markedness hierarchies are driven by a mutual impact of the pressures to become unmarked called "markedness reduction" and to preserve marked elements called "Preservation of the Marked", which can be formally represented within OT through an interaction between a set of faithfulness constraints and markedness constraints. Based on the leading ideas above, this dissertation explores the phonological structures and various phonological processes in the Wenzhou dialect and the Wujiang dialect to determine the phonologically contrastive features with the marked value, and reveals that the mechanism of "Preservation of the Marked" behave differently in the two dialects.A thorough comparison of the two dialects regarding segmental inventories, number of contrastive features, phonological behaviors of contrastive feature with the marked value, surface syllabic inventories and tonal system leads us to believe that the Wenzhou dialect has a higher degree of markedness in phonological system. To be more specific, the comparative study yields the following findings. Firstly, in terms of the underlying inventory of consonants, the Wenzhou dialect is more marked than the Wujiang dialect in that the Wenzhou dialect has more PoA contrastive features and underlyingly preserve the highly marked contrastive feature [GLOTTAL], which not only triggers phonological processes but also makes impact on the phonological behavior of the adjacent vowels; meanwhile, the Wenzhou dialect also has more MoA contrastive features and the marked value of the contrastive feature [continuant] triggers the alternation of labial fricatives; what’ more, the marked value of the contrastive features in the Wenzhou dialect are more likely to be triggers of phonological processes. Secondly, in terms of the vowel inventory, both the Wenzhou dialect and the Wujiang dialect are marked due to a large number of underlying contrastive features and several highly marked segments, such as/(?)/and/(?)/in Wenzhou and/(?)/and/(?)/in Wujiang. However, the major difference in the two inventories lies in the distribution of the marked segments and the phonological behavior of the marked segments. Thirdly, in terms of the role the contrastive features play in the phonological system, the Wenzhou dialect seems more marked since it has a larger number of contrastive features and involves more complicated phonological processes triggered by the marked value of the contrastive features, which leads to a big gap between the underlying presentations and the surface ones. Additionally, like the segmental system, the tonal system of the Wenzhou dialect is also demonstrated to be more complex than that of the Wujiang dialect. Fourthly, in terms of syllabic inventory, it is assumed that the Wenzhou dialect is also more marked than the Wujiang dialect. Although both the Wenzhou dialect and the Wujiang dialect develop towards a system with less marked structures, both dialects preserve some highly marked structures so as to avoid excessive neutralization. Regarding open syllables, one of the most important of phonological structures, the Wenzhou dialect preserves many highly marked structures, including both falling diphthongs and rising diphthongs, while the Wujiang dialect has only CV structures, the least marked structure in the syllabic inventory.The results of the comparative study also attest to the hypothesis put forward by this dissertation:A dialect of a lower degree of intelligibility like the Wenzhou dialect has a higher degree of markedness in phonological system, which is mainly due to a relatively larger number of contrastive features and the more active role the contrastive features with marked value play in the phonological processes. The more contrastive features a dialect has, the bigger inventory it owns together with more highly marked segments; the more active behaviors the contrastive features have, the more synchronic and diachronic phonological processes they trigger and the more complicated the phonological system turns out to be. Accordingly, if a dialect boasts a great number of contrastive features and their marked values are highly active, the dialect may not only have inherited more initial and final categories from the ancient times, but also undergone a significant change in its phonological system. In this case, the dialect is likely to be very low for intelligibility. The Wenzhou dialect is one typical example.The dissertation is made up of seven chapters. Chapter One is the introduction. It surveys the background and achievements of comparative studies of southern and northern Wu dialects. It also introduces the research questions, methodology, and data source of this research.Chapter Two includes an experiment on mutual intelligibility between northern and southern Wu dialects. Resorting to the traditional transcription (dictation) tests, the experiment first evaluates the plausibility of the statements like "southern and northern Wu dialects are mutually unintelligible","northern Wu dialects have a high degree of mutual intelligibility", and "southern Wu dialects have a low degree of mutual intelligibility". It then calculates the degree of intelligibility of dialects of five regions, clarifies their positions in a hierarchy, and then computes the intelligibility between every two of the five dialects and their difference. On the basis of the experiment, the dissertation advances several hypotheses:the mutual intelligibility between dialects and the asymmetry of intelligibility between dialects is in a great measure related to their phonological structures; the mutual intelligibility between dialects is determined by the difference in markedness of phonological structure of the dialects; the varied markedness of phonological structure results in the varied intelligibility of dialects.Chapter Three provides a theoretic framework to explain the asymmetry of intelligibility of dialects from the perspective of markedness of phonological structures. It first introduces the reason why asymmetry of intelligibility may result from difference in markedness. For this purpose, we introduce the Markedness Differential Hypothesis and its application to researches in second language acquisition in accounting for difference in difficulty of language acquisition, with the belief that MDH may also be borrowed to account for asymmetry of intelligibility. The chapter gives a brief introduction to the theory of markedness, particularly de Lacy’s developments of the theory, such as the nature of markedness, the way to determine hierarchy of markedness and the interactions among different hierarchies (2002,2006). The chapter also gives an introduction to Optimality Theory as the framework for analyses of synchronic distributions and co-occurrence restrains, as well as diachronic processes, and the Contrastive Hierarchy Theory (Dresher2002,2003,2009) as the framework for analyses of underlying specification of contrastive features and the role their marked value plays in the phonological system.Chapter Four and Chapter Five depict respectively the phonological structures of the Wenzhou dialect and the Wujiang dialect. By examining the existing literature on these two dialects, these two chapters take advantage of modern phonological theories to explore surface and underlying inventories, contrastive features, syllabic phonotactics and tonal system of the two dialects.Chapter Six compares the markedness of phonological structures of the Wenzhou dialect and the Wujiang dialect. To be more specific, we conduct a comparative study on the marked degree of different phonological structures of the two dialects regarding surface and underlying inventories, alternations between them, and syllabic inventories, examine the relationship between markedness and contrastiveness and the influence of contrastive features on phonological systems, and explore the major phonological factors impacting on intelligibility of the dialects, in order to test our hypotheses against the results of the comparison.Chapter Seven is the conclusion. This chapter summarizes the comparison of phonological structure of the two representative dialects in terms of their mutual intelligibility, and the phonological causes of the possible link between markedness of phonological structure and asymmetry of intelligibility between the two groups of dialects. As a conclusion, this chapter also points to the limitedness of this research and researches to be continued after this research.