A Study On The Pronunciation

Dawu Country lies on the boundaries of Hubei Province and Hunan Province andalso on the southwest part of Dabie Mountain Range. On the north of Dawu Countryare Xinyang City and Kafang town in Xinxian Country, which both belong toZhongyuan Mandarin; on the east of Dawu is Hong’an Country, which belongs toJianghuai Mandarin; on the southwest is Wuhan city, which is Xi’nan Mandarin.Therefore, the special place possesses its distinctive characteristics of the dialect.Moreover, there is still an argument on whether it belongs to Xi’nan Mandarin orChuyu. Unfortunately, there is hardly famous article or books doing research on thedialect. So it is of significance to describe and analyze the dialect: on one hand, it canprovide rich materials and rich the local culture; on the other hand, it can helpclassify the areas of Chinese dialects.Therefore,I devoted to studying it. Based on the dialect materials that Irecorded in local country, the thesis made full use of advanced computer programssuch as Feifeng, Pratt, TFD and LGIS to output compare and analyze the dialect. It notonly describes the system of consonants, vowels and tones, but also summarizes itscharacteristics from both historical and synchronic points and focuses on analyzingthe features of initial consonants of Ni and Lai and try to give some possibleexplanations.There are seven chapters in the thesis: Chapter One is the introduction.Firstly, it talks something about the cultural and geographical backgrounds.Then itintroduces the subject and the method of the survey, the source of material and themail symbols that used in the thesis.Chapter Two we list the phonetic system of Dawu dialect including22consonants,42vowels and5tones. Besides, we conclude the main features ofconsonants, vowels and tones with the help of program Pratt as well as thecombinatory rules of consonants, vowels and tones in Dawu dialect.Chapter Three is focused on comparison between Dawu dialect and thephonetic pattern of Middle Ancient Period in consonants, vowels and tones from the point of historical point with TFD program. Moreover, we will also summarize thecorrespondent laws and list a large number of exemplary words as well as theexceptional ones in the form of detailed–made tables.Chapter Four, Five and Six are devoted to the comparison between Dawudialect and its neighboring dialects such as Xinyang dialect and Kafang dialect inHenan Province, Hong’an dialect and Wuhan dialect in Hubei Province. The threechapters mainly compare the similarities and differences among the five dialects andfind that the neighboring dialects have great influences on the evolvement of Dawudialect.Chapter Seven is a about the system study of the evolvement of initialconsonants of Ni and Lai in Dawu dialect including the characteristics and themotivations of such kind of evolvement. During the research we found an interestingphenomenon that the young-style Dawu dialect is a bit different from the old style inpronunciation of initial consonants of Ni and LaiThe last part is a conclusion. It mainly sums up the results of the thesis andputs forward some questions with the expectation of further study. Besides, thetables of Chinese characters with homophone are listed in appendix part.