| This paper is an interdisciplinary study presenting extensive research and detailed analysis of Yunnanese, a Southwestern Mandarin language spoken in Yunnan, China, and one of its varieties spoken in the city of Kunming--Kunming Chinese. The studies are concentrated in three particular aspects: the language communities, the phonological systems, and the phonological developments in the past four decades. The language communities are discussed from the perspectives of anthropology, sociolinguistics, and dialectology, covering such aspects as the history of the civilization of Yunnan and Kunming, the ethnographical and ethnohistorical background of the twenty-four minority nationalities in the Province, the demographic statistics of these minorities, and dialect geography of Southwestern Mandarin subgroup, as well as Yunnanese and its varieties. A language survey has been conducted in some detail on the varieties of Yunnanese represented by one hundred and thirty-five locations, and a comparative study has also been done regarding their segmental and tonal structures. Taking Kunming Chinese as the representative of Yunnanese and by comparing data representing two different varieties of Kunming Chinese spoken in two different periods of time, i.e., in 1940s and in 1980s, the most significant sound changes undergone by Kunming Chinese have been observed. Generalizations of these phonological changes have been captured and reflected by the phonological rules. Tone sandhi studies in autosegmental and metrical framework have revealed the edge sensitive characteristic of Kunming Chinese tones; also discovered is the constrains of tone sandhi imposed by syntactic structure and lexical category. |
