An Acoustic Study On The Phonetic Features Of Taishan Dialect,Cantonese

This dissertation employs acoustic phonetic methods to analyze the phonetic features of Taishan Dialect. There are totally six chapters. Chapter One introduces basic features and current study situations of the dialect, and briefly interprets the steps and methods employed. Chapter Two focuses on the phonetic features of consonants, by means of analyzing the sound spectrograms, duration, Transition Cue and sound track equations to study the manner of articulation and place of articulation. Chapter Three focuses on the phonetic features of vowels, by means of analyzing the acoustic diagrams of vowels, formant diagrams and duration proportional plotting graph to study the value of vowels, dynamic changes of pronunciation and co-articulation effect. Chapter Four focuses on the phonetic features of tones, by means of analyzing the diachronic sources of Middle Chinese to study the developing rules, as well as analyzing and pitch diagrams to study the pitch features. Chapter Five is a special study into the morphological changed tones of Taishan Dialect, analyzing the Middle Chinese tone sources of the changed tones to generalize the categories of them, studying how factors like pitch pattern, part of speech, utilization frequency have effects on the pitch pattern and duration, as well as employs a perception experiment to study the factors that distinguish lexical meanings. Chapter Six is a summary of this dissertation and propose the problems that remain to be solved. Based on the above researches and previous studies, re-systemize the phonological system of Taishan Dialect.