| Through the unremitting efforts of generations of dialectologists,the dialectological community has gained a clear understanding of the macroscopic partitioning of Chinese dialects,but the understanding of the microscopic dialectal differences within narrow areas is not yet clear.Perceptual dialectology investigates the perception and attitudes of non-linguists towards the language varieties in surrounding areas,and takes the spatial perception and evaluation of the local people towards surrounding dialects as an objective existence for statistical research,which not only has the nature of geographical linguistics,but are also closely related to the research of traditional dialectology,and can be used as a supplement to the study of dialectal differences in narrow areas.Therefore,perceptual dialectology deserves more attention from the domestic dialectological community And this paper conducts a perceptual dialectological study in Zhijiang County,Huaihua City,Hunan Province,to explore the variation of local people’s spatial perception of language,and the influence of different social variables on the results of the subjects’ perception.Chapter One introduces the academic research value and the significance of perceptual dialectology.At present,the researches on Chinese perceptual dialectology are still inadequate.And this paper is a meaningful attempt to conduct a study of perceptual dialectology with the Zhijiang dialect as the research object.And the research objectives of this paper are also presented.Chapter Two introduces the research methods and basic principles of perceptual dialectology,and then details the research methods of this paper.Firstly,the design idea of the questionnaire of the Zhijiang dialect perception is introduced.Hand-drawn maps and the difference grading method are used to investigate the perception of dialectal differences of the subjects.The method of pleasure degree evaluation is adopted to obtain the attitudinal evaluation of the subjects to the dialects in various regions.This study takes 28 towns and townships of Zhijiang as the survey sites.With 20-30 subjects in each site,there are a total number of 707 subjects investigated in the county.Secondly,the workflow of this paper is presented: first,the survey data is pre-processed,and the survey results are sorted into two tables: Differences,and Pleasure Evaluation.Then,the dist function in R,a programming language,is used to calculate the Euclidean distance between the scores of perceptual distance,pleasure distance and phonological distance of all subjects.Finally,two algorithms,the Multidimensional Scaling(MDS)and the cluster analysis,are introduced.Chapter Three provides statistics and analysis on the results of perception survey,which includes perceptual distance and pleasure distance.After clarifying the distribution of perceptual distance and pleasure distance with density maps,the paper uses the MDS and the cluster analysis to explore the geographical distribution of perceptual results of the Zhijiang dialect,visualizes them into language maps,and makes a description and a preliminary analysis to explore the dimension of geographical distribution and classification of perceptual distance and pleasure distance.Chapter Four performs an MDS and a cluster analysis on the matrix of phonological distance.Based on the results of the calculation of internal language features recorded in Zhijiang County Annals,the two algorithms mentioned above are used to visualize as language maps.And the distribution patterns of phonological distances and their pattern influencing factors are explored.Chapter Five makes a comparison of the perceptual distances,pleasure distances and phonological distances.And the underlying mechanisms and motivations are analyzed according to the similarities and differences in the distribution of language maps..Chapter Six is comparisons of gender and age differences in perceptual distances and pleasure distances.The data are divided into several subsets according to the variables of subjects’ gender and age.And the MDS and the cluster analysis are also conducted in each subset,and are adopted in visualization to explore the perceptual differences of different social variables.And the last chapter presents conclusions and the research prospect.The main conclusions of this paper are as follows:(1)The perception of Zhijiang people shows a“center-periphery”monocentric language distribution.To a certain extent,the dialect awareness of the people reflects the internal language characteristics of Zhijiang,which are related to the prestige of the county seat(城关、县城),language characteristics,sense of identity,and other factors.(2)There are age and gender differences in the spatial perception of dialects and language attitudes among people from different places and of different social backgrounds,which are related to education,career,personal experience and social network.And at the end of the paper,the prospect of the research on Chinese perceptual dialectology is proposed. |
