A Dynamic Study Of Literary And Colloquial Readings In Chengdu Dialect

This dissertation aims to analyze the conditions of literary and colloquial readings in Chengdu dialect by combining both the language fieldwork and the theory of sociolinguistics.The research includes two parts:the overall language sketch and the specific investigation into the phenomenon of literary and colloquial readings.In the overall language sketch,I carried out a linguistic fieldwork that investigated 2500 frequently-used characters in Chengdu dialect,and 143 characters which have both literary reading and colloquial reading were selected from the corpus.Then,the types and features of literary and colloquial readings from the perspective of initial,final and tone,and the reason why this situation happens were investigated.As for specific researches,firstly,based on the sociolinguistic survey I made for literary and colloquial readings in Chengdu dialect,I classified respondents by the criterions of age,educational background and gender.The presenting common phenomenon is that the influence of mandarin and Chengdu Dialect plays a major role in the usage of literary and colloquial readings.Meanwhile,the ability to imitate and the pursuit for being more fashionable also contribute to the respondents' inclination of using more literary readings.In the following parts of my dissertation,I proposed a theoretical notion,namely "The Theory of Graduation"(?????),to refer to proportions of literary reading and colloquial reading in speakers' pronunciation.Specifically,in the light of one same character's different proportion of literary reading and colloquial reading in different words spelled by this character,Graduation reveals the different power of literary reading and colloquial reading in a dynamic competitive relation.