The Study On Vocabulary Of Wugang Dialect Hunan Province

Wugang, a county-level city is located in the northwest of Hunan province. And its language, Wugang dialect belongs to Wushao zone, a subzone of Xiang dialect’s Loushao zone. Scholars have conducted researches on many aspects of Wugang dialect, such as its pronounciation and its grammar. However, there are rare studies on its words and phrases and those rare studies are basically about single words or a certain group of words.This thesis takes the words and phrases in the dialect of Wugang city as the study subject. It conducts a sychronical and diachroncal study on the words and phrases of Wugang dialect multidirectionally through the fieldwork,comparision method,and inductive-analysis reasoning. After the analyzing and summarizing, a glossary of Wugang dialect is worked out with its features being concluded. Meanwhile, to study the subordination of Wugang dialect from the similarity of glossaries, this thesis conducts a comparative study between the glossary of Wugang dialect, that of Loudi dialect which belongs the same zone as Wugang dialect and that of Changsha dialect which belongs to another zone. This makes the evidence in the glossary aspect for the zonal study of dialects.The thesis constitutes five chapters.Chapter One is Introduction. It mainly introduces Wugang and the Wugang dialect, the research status of Wugang dialect-related studies, the study purpose, the significance of the study and its methodology, the source of linguistic data and the situation of respondents and the phonetic system of Wugang dialect.Chapter Two is the glossary of Wugang dialect. After the survey, 3096 common words and expressions in Wugang dialect are listed and classified into 29 categories. In addition, their phonetic notations are given and their meanings are paraphrased in Mandarin Chinese. Chapter Three is the vocabulary analysis of Wugang dialect.Based upon lateral comparison between Mandarin Chinese and Wugang dialect, Conducting comparison and analysis from word form, sense, composition method, grammatical function, and compositional motivation for the lexicology of Wugang dialect. In Vertical comparison, we discuss and organize the etymological justification of Wugang dialect. Special vocabulary in Wugang dialect and the Traditional cultural practices which reflected in the vocabulary are summarized. This work also exhibits the lexicology connotation for Wugang dialect.Chapte Four is about the similarity surveying and comparison between the glossary of Wugang dialect and those of relevant dialects. In this part, conducting lexical comparison between Wugang dialect and Loudi dialect(Loushao zone),Changsha dialect(Changyi zone) from lexical distribution and Morphological similarity. And briefly analyzing the reasons for the differences between the glossaries. Besides, it discusses whether the criteria for the sound zoning is consistent with the closeness and figures out the subordination of Wugang dialect from the perspective of similarity in glossary.Chapter Five, the Conclusion part, summarizes the main findings in this thesis and mentions the limitations of this study.