A Multi-Conditional And Cumulative Fulfillment Model For Analyzing The Cause Of Phonetic Variations

Language is a customary sound-acting system of social communication among human beings. Sound, which is the material basis of language, and the meaning it represents, comprise a linguistic unity. In the field of speech sound, the study of phonetic variations in the Chinese language has always focused on areas such as the neutral tone, retroflex suffixation, tone sandhi and the phonetic variation of "a" ("啊"). And it is always assumed that there is only one reason or condition for any occurrence of a phonetic variant. However, as to "zhei", the phonetic variant of "zhe" ("这") , two explanations have been commonly offered: One is that the variant "zhei" is the compound phonetic form of "zhe" and "yi" (" 一 ") and the other is that it is the oral form of "zhe". According to the traditional assumption, only one of the two explanations is correct. But both of them turned up to be reasonable and partially correct through our investigation.Actually the phonetic variant "zhei" appears in speech through various ways, the reasons of which can be either simple or quite complicated. There can be only one or more conditions for its occurrence and the conditions can be phonetic, syntactic, semantic or pragmatic.Here we suggest building up "A Multi-Conditional and Cumulative Fulfillment Model for Analyzing the Cause of Phonetic Variations". As the model shows, phonetic variation follows a multi-variable functional system in the form "y=f(xl,x2,x3,???)", in which "y" represents the phonetic variant, "x" the various conditions, and "f" the fulfillment of the conditions. Any one of the three factors is variable. The conditions differ in importance, rareness, order, etc, while the fulfillment varies in degree and manner. The word "cumulative" means when there are two conditions fulfilled in the process of a phonetic variation, the effect is cumulated andstrengthened. The more the conditions present are, and/or the more sufficiently and typically they are fulfilled, the more possibly a certain variant would occur and the more valid and stable the variant will be after its occurrence. The functional system can be either a one-cause-one-effect mapping or a multi-cause-one-effect mapping. The former is in itself an exceptional case of the latter where there exists only one condition. Therefore we aim at discovering a more effective and forceful theoretical model for the analysis of the cause of phonetic variations, based on a series of investigations on the phonetic variation of "zhe".