A Research On Vocabulary Of Dawu Dialect

Dawu county is located in the juncture of Hubei Province and Henan Province.It is also a newly-constructed county in the juncture of four counties.Around it there are different dialect regions,such as Central Plains mandarin,southwestern mandarin,Jiangsu mandarin and so on.Its special geographical position has made its dialect feature with certain particularity;Previously there are scholars who made systematic studies about the phone of Dawu’s dialect.However,there are less studies on its vocabulary.Because there are obvious differences among different regions of Dawu in areas like tone and vocabulary,this paper has selected Chengguan town where the government is located as the representative and focused on the study of dialect vocabulary of Chengguan town of Dawu county.Through field investigation and recording and sorting out dialect vocabulary,this paper has listed a relatively complete vocabulary table of Dawu dialect.Upon that this paper has made a comparison between Dawu dialect vocabulary with vocabulary of mandarin in order to discuss differences between the two with respect to phone,word formation,word meaning and grammar;after that,the author describes and analyzes the addressing terms,custom terms and ancient words in Dawu dialect in this paper so as to reveal the uniqueness of Dawu dialect regarding its vocabulary.In total,this paper is consisting of five chapters:The first chapter is the introduction where the general information of Dawu county is introduced,including its geographical position,natural environment,division of administrative areas,division of dialects and so on.After that,the research status quo of Dawu dialect is summarized and concluded;meanwhile,the purpose,significance,method and phone cooperators of this paper is introduced;finally,the phone system of Dawu dialect is described.The second chapter is Dawu Dialect Vocabulary Table.In this chapter,common words and terms used in Dawu dialect are collected through field investigation method by basing on Dawu Dialect Vocabulary Table.In total the terms can be divided into twenty-nine categories which have provided adequate corpus for this systematic research.The third chapter is the horizontal comparison between vocabulary of Dawu dialect and that of mandarin.According to vocabularies included into Dawu Dialect Vocabulary Table,the two are compared in areas like phone,word formation,word meaning and grammar.The fourth chapter is on featured phrases of Dawu dialect,including addressing terms,custom terms and ancient terms.Among all of them,addressing terms,especially special addressing terms,imply abundant emotions and present the unique social psychology and ways of thinking of local people.Customer words imply rich regional culture and show the etiquette and habits of Dawu people on occasions like reproduction and funeral.On the other hand,ancient terms present the inheritance of Dawu dialect vocabulary from ancient Chinese as well as its development.The fifth chapter is the conclusion where basic ideas of this paper are concluded and issues that are to be further studied are put forward.