A Study Of Baotou Nasal Rhythm Variation

This dissertation is a sociolinguistic study of Mandarin nasal rhythm variation. Using the variation sociolinguistic theory, we investigate the speech community of Kundulun District, Baotou in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in China. After quantitative statistical analyses of a sample including 27 subjects, this dissertation interprets the constraint effect of nasal rhythm variation from internal language factors and external language factors, and then describes the structure of this special speech community. All the field work and analyses are done within the frame of Real Time.Mandarin nasal rhythm variation study is a re-investigation of the same speech community after 25 years. It also employs variation approach with the respect to theory basis, field method, field unit and analysis method. The findings are: Although there is no great change on Mandarin nasal variation, some new factors begin to work, including phonological conditions like "Adjoining Nasalization", "Stress", "Tone"; sociolinguistic conditions like "Occupation", "Original Dwelling Place", "Social Network" and "Speech Style". The comparison of research in 1987 with the one in 2010 and the explanation of these changes are the aims of this dissertation.Two variables are focused on in this research:vowel nasalization and consonant deletion. They are two separate variation items. We report the statistical findings in two ways, and it confirms again some effects on these variables which have been found by other scholars.Now, some social factors continue to influence on nasalization and deletion and several weak correlations strengthen their interpretive power on them. The most obvious improvement is that "Occupation" and "Education" do play important roles in conditioning effects. Dialect background remains broad variation range. However, the sequence of conditioning effects in the group inverts. On nasalization "Gender" and "Style" begin to favor while deletion has no more stylistic differentiation as a Marker 25 years ago. Nasalization and deletion have no age or generation gap. On these discoveries, the dissertation then concludes that nasal variation as a change in progress slows down its speed in evolvement. And the structure of Baotou speech community shows a direction toward stratification model. On these bases, the dissertation finally gives a prospect to futher Chinese sociolinguistic researhces.