A Typological Study Of Chinese Dialect Phonetics

There are so much Chinese dialects in China, and the survey and research of a single Chinese dialect has make a great achievement, but there is little attention about the typology of phonology of Chinese dialects now. This dissertation will study the phonological typology of 140 Chinese dialects based the published reports of Chinese dialects to test the universals of phonology that found by Maddieson et al. At the same time, this dissertation will study some sound changes in Chinese dialects.There are 9 Chapters in this dissertation. Chapter 1 mainly introduces the background and method of this research, the achievement of other scholars, the resource of the data and the symbols in this dissertation.Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 mainly study the consonants and vowels of the 140 Chinese dialects, besides testing the universals of phonology that found by other scholars, this dissertation also discuss the uniqueness of the whole Chinese dialects. Compared with other languages of the world, the frequency of aspirated voiceless stops, nasal/m/and/(?)/, vowel/y/and/(?)/ and the diphthong/ia/and/ua/is very high in Chinese dialects.Chapter 4 chooses 70 Chinese dialects and counts the frequency of CV sequences, then concludes CV sequence whose frequency is highest is favored. Finally, we try to explain the reason why one CV sequence is favored.Chapter 5 chooses 12 Chinese dialects which have final/-p-t-k/, and counts the number of SVS syllables, we find that the syllable type where the position of initial is front of the position of final is favored.Chapter 6 mainly studies the evolution of nasals, and induces some rules of nasals’ evolution. According to the rules of nasal’s evolution, we try to explain some strange phonetic phenomenon in ancient Chinese and pursue the etymology of some words in Chinese dialects.Chapter 7 collects a lot of examples about the evolution between labial stops and velar stops when followed by a back and round vowel. In this Chapter, we also discuss the etymology of some words in Southern Chinese dialect.Chapter 8 mainly discusses the evolution of some rhymes ended by nasal, We find that there are two circulating systems in the rhymes that ended by nasal/(?)/,the one is the systems that consists of/a(?)/,/(?)/,/u(?)/and/ua(?)/, the other is the systems that consists of/i(?),/ia(?)/and/iu(?)/. In the rhymes ended by nasal/n/, there are also two circulating systems. The one is the system that consists of/in/,/ien/ and/ian/, the other is the system that consists of/uan/,/uan/and/un/.Chapter 9 mainly generalizes the conclusions of this dissertation, reviews some shortage of this dissertation and raises some problems which is very important but not carried out in this dissertation.