A Phonetic Study Of The Hangzhou Dialect Of Wu Language

This thesis is a phonetic study on the Hangzhou Wu dialect.Its contents include(1)the vowels and diphthongs,(2)the voicing distinction of obstruents,(3)the near-mergers on citation tones,and(4)the-er suffix.12 native speakers(6 males and 6 females)provided speech data.The introduction gives an outline of Hangzhou phonology and related isssues.The four chapters investigate the above-mentioned four topics.Conclusions are summarized as follows.Hangzhou monophthongs have a triangular distribution in the acoustic vowel plane.Acoustic results suggest that falling diphthongs are grouped with monophthongs,since the former has a static spectral target and the latter has a dynamic spectral target.However,rising diphthongs are vowel sequences.Hangzhou has a tripartite distinction of obstruents into voiceless unaspirated,voiceless aspirated,and voiced.But VOT cannot differentiate the voiced obstruents from their voiceless counterparts.In stead,the silent closure duration can.And breathiness was detected on the vowel throughout the entire syllable following the voiced stops,and throughout the first half of syllable duration following voiced affricates.The voiced stops /v z/ generally maintained voicing;and the weak fricative /v/ retained more voicing productions than the strong one /z/.There is no segment /(?)/ detected from the waveform or spectrogram of speech signal.However,the detected breathinss on the /(?)-/ syllable and the duration data of the /(?)-/ syllable suggest the existence of /(?)/.In other words,there is also a tripartite distinction of voicing between the onset-less,/h-/,and /(?)-/ syllables.Tones are undergoing sound changing in Hangzhou: T1/T4 in a stage of merger in production and partial merge in perception,and T2/T5 in a stage of partial merger in production or in a tendency to merge but still distinguishable in perception.The production data are higly merged in young group,and there is a certain degree of merger in discrimination test too.The data show one tone is merging to the other one,rather than the two tones are changing into a new one.The palatograms and linguograms confirmed that the Hangzhou-er suffix is basically a lateral [l(?)].And the acoustic data suggest that the-er suffix is simultaneously a rhotic,as it triggers vowel rhoticization on the preceding syllable.The morphological process of-er suffixation in Hangzhou does not result in phonological resyllabification.The-er suffix is not a weakened syllable,and the multisyllabic words with-er suffixation are subject to general rules of tone sandhi in Hangzhou.However,the-er suffixation still has impact on the preceding syllable.In addition to the rhoticization of the vowel on the preceding syllable,it is observed that the two falling diphthongs are monophthongized,[ei ou] > [e o] respectively,under the process of-er suffixation.