A Study Of Early Yue Opera Phonetics Based On Audio-visual Materials

Yueju Opera(Shaoxing)is one of Chinese traditional operas which originated in Shengzhou,developed in Shanghai and is popular in the Zhejiang,Jiangsu and Shanghai.It has evolved profoundly over its first half-century of life,gradually taking shape into the classic form seen today,with a subtle and dynamic evolution of its stage voice as well.This thesis takes the early audio-visual and textual materials of Yueju,such as records,films and audio-visual recordings,as its research material,and takes the early stage speech of Yueju from the emergence of audio materials in the late1820 s to the maturity of Yueju in the 1960 s as its research object,mainly depicting its phonetic appearance,as well as summarising and discussing the patterns of rhyming behaviour and analysing the special phonetic phenomena.At the same time,the audiovisual material of early Yueju opera also provides vivid information for the study of the earlier forms of the dialects spoken around Shengzhou in the same period.The paper is divided into seven chapters.Chapter 1: Introduction.This chapter provides a brief overview and history of the early development of Yueju opera and,for the purpose of a chronological examination,a staging of the periods covered.It also explains the research methodology and sources of material.At the same time,it sets out a pinyin-style reference framework for the phonetic system of early Yueju opera based on the phonetic system of the Old School Sheng dialect recorded by Qian Zhenyi.Chapter 2: The phonetic system.In the first half of this chapter,the phonological framework of the early Yueju opera is outlined in terms of the four periods into which it is divided,and the phonetic forms of the vowels in the accents of the representative artists of each period are described through the notation of vocal materials,and the vowel positions are summarised to obtain the phonological system of the early Yueju opera.In the second half,the vowel characteristics are outlined and the medieval sources of the vowels are sorted out.Chapter 3: The rhyme system.Earlier in this chapter,the same staging of early Yueju describes the various stages of the rhyme system and sorts out the medieval sources of the rhymes.The third section of this chapter is devoted to the issue of rhyme and rhyming parts in early Yueju.Chapter 4: Word sound phenomena in early Yueju opera.This chapter is devoted to a thematic examination and discussion of the early.This chapter examines the problems associated with the sharp doughnut sound,the singing of intonation characters,the simplification of rhymes,and the change in rhyme value in early Yueju opera as found in the above description.Chapter 5: The phonologies of Yueju and Shengzhou dialect.This chapter discusses the inheritance of the Sheng dialect in Yueju opera and the non-shared evolution of the two dialects after their separation,and summarises the factors contributing to phonetic variation,including the origin and native background of the actors,the dialects of the places of performance,and the mimetic inertia of the teachers.Chapter 6: The official dialect-dialect dichotomy-the relationship between operatic phonology and real language in the light of Yueju phonology.This chapter explores the influence of the relationship between the old official dialect and the local dialect on the stage speech of local operas,and uses this as a dimension to classify the speech of traditional Chinese opera genres.In the third section,suggestions are made for the standardisation of Yueju phonetics based on the overall understanding of the evolution of Yueju phonetics in the previous section.And Chapter 7 is Conclusion.