A Phonological Study About Wuxue City Dialect Of Hubei Province

Wuxue is divided into east and west phonetic areas.Systematic phonetic descriptions can be only found in Guangji Dialect Records(1985)and Hubei Dialect Investigation Report(1948).The research on the dialect phonetic of west phonetic area is a long time from now,and the content of which is not comprehensive enough.There are differences in the records of some pronunciations.This paper takes the urban area of Wuxue county as the survey point,and the dialect phonetic characteristics will be investigated in detail.This paper is divided into six chapters.Chapter 1 is the introduction.It introduces the overview of Wuxue city’s geography,history,and humanities,and also includes the overview of Wuxue dialect,the summary of previous studies on Wuxue dialect phonetics as well as the research’s purpose,significance,methods,source of dialectal materials,and the information of pronunciation partners.Chapter 2 is the phonetic system of Wuxue city dialect and the literary and colloquial readings.Chapter 3 is the phonetic change of Wuxue city dialect,including erhua,erwei,tone sandhi and other phonetic changes.Chapter 4 is the comparison of phonetic system between Wuxue city dialect and the Middle Chinese.In addition,the tonal distribution of contrasting finals of MC Qingqu 清去 characters is descriped.Chapter 4 is about phonetic differences in the initials,finals,tones,literary and colloquial readings of Wuxue city dialect between old and young people.Chapter 5 is the experiment of single-character tones of Wuxue city dialect,and the analysis of spectrogram of some initials and finals.Based on the above research,this article draws the following main conclusions:(1)The characteristics of initials:all voiced initials are devoiced,plosives and fricatives are basically differentiated according to the law of "Ping 平 sound aspiration,Ze 仄but no aspiration",and there are still some aspirated words whose tone is Ze 仄;The initial consonants have the difference of Jian 尖 and Tuan 团 sounds;most of the characters with MC Ni 泥 and Niang 娘 initials are mixed with the characters whose initial is MC Lai来 initial,which is pronounced as[1].The initials matched with the[(?)]-group finals should be recorded as the post-tongue fricative[(?)],the labial tooth fricative[f]and the zero initial.(2)The characteristics of finals:There is a set of nasal finals[?,u?,(?)].There is no tail of the rhyme for the Rusheng入声finals.Judging from the acoustic sonogram,there is no throat plug tail in the entering tone.But some scholars record it as a throat plug tail.This may be because the entering tone value is 213,which is a falling and rising tone.When the tonal value drops to the lowest,the voice is a little bit tight,similar to throat plug tail in sense of hearing.There are 15 erhua儿化 finals and 3 erwei finals.(3)Tonal characteristics:there is the phenomenon of tonal distribution of contrasting finals in MC QingQu 清去 characters,some MC QingQu 清去 characters’tone is Rusheng 入声;the experimental results of singlecharacter tones are:Yinping 阴平[332],Yangping 阳平[51],Shangsheng 上声[33],Yinqu 阴去[35],Yangqu 阳去[31],Rusheng 入声[25/224/214];the single-character tone-length sequenceis:Rusheng 入声[214]>Rusheng 入声[224]>Shangsheng 上声>Yangqu阳去>Yinqu 阴去>Yinping 阴平>Yangping 阳平>Rusheng 入声[25];The upper and lower limits of male tonal range are lower than females’,and the range of tonal range is also smaller than that of females.(4)The characteristics of phonetic change:there are some phenomenon of erhua and erui and tones combination,change of initials and finals,tones sandhi,which are unregular.(5)The nature of the dialect difference between the new and the old:there are phonetic difference of initials,finals,tones,the literary and colloquial readings,such as the difference of Jian 尖 and Tuan团 sounds and[(?)]-group finals;dialects of young people tend to be closer to Mandarin,but at the same time they will be restricted by the dialect phonetic system.