Journal articles on the topic 'Wu dialects Wu dialects Chinese language'

Shanghai Chinese (Shanghainese; 上海话) is a Wu dialect (ISO 639-3; code: wuu) spoken in the city of Shanghai (CN-31), one of the four municipalities in the People's Republic of China. Over the last century, the dialect has been heavily influenced by neighbouring dialects spoken in the provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, such as Jianghuai Mandarin (江淮官话), the Suzhou Wu dialect (吴语苏州话), and the Ningbo Wu dialect (吴语宁波话), in addition to two other, more distant dialects, Cantonese (广东话) and Northern Mandarin (北方官话). Most native speakers of Shanghai Chinese are in fact descendants of immigrants from Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces who moved to Shanghai in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. More recently, the position of Shanghai Chinese has been eroded with the influx of immigrants from other parts of the country and the widespread adoption of Standard Chinese.

An important contribution to our knowledge of tone sandhi among the Chinese dialects is Lü's (1980) article on the tones and tone sandhi behaviour of Danyang, a Wu dialect of Chinese. Lü's description of Danyang is, to date, our only source on the dialect. While it is a northern Wu dialect, the tone sandhi patterning in Danyang differs from Shanghai, Suzhou, Wuxi and other dialects in the vicinity. There are a number of interesting problems related to tone in the dialect. This paper restricts the topic to only one of these problems, namely the treatment of the six basic tone patterns in Danyang, focusing in particular on the pattern in which a contour tone is copied Onto adjacent syllables in the tone sandhi domain.

Perceptual dialectology (PD) is branch of sociolinguistics which investigates ordinary people’s (non-linguists) perceptions about different dialects in the language community they are living in. Most of the PD research was implemented in Europe or America, with little attention devoted to China, a country with many kinds of dialects. Applying Preston’s (1981) tool for PD studies: draw-a-map task, this research analyzed dialect maps drawn from 13 respondents, who were college students from Guangdong province, China. It aimed to find out how Guangdong residents perceive Chinese dialects. There are three major findings: (1) respondents used provincial boundaries to differentiate dialect areas but did not agree on their distribution; (2) Yue dialect and Wu dialect were thought to be more pleasant; (3) respondents were concerned about economic influence on dialects and dialect protection.

Several scholars have made various remarks about the language history of the Wu and Min areas. Some of these remarks concern non-Chinese languages that may have been spoken in the area(s) and that may have left some traces in the forms of Chinese spoken there now (substrata). Other remarks concern the possible prehistory of what appear now to be transitional or mixed forms, or features that may be present due to some ancient influence or borrowing. In considering such matters it is important to keep in mind the basic principles (and biases) of historical linguistics, and of the potential role of philological materials in the discussion. My fieldwork in China this spring, as well as my research in the past, point to some special historical relationship between southern Wu and northern Min. This appears to mean that the boundaries between the northern and southern types of each of the two dialect groups are stronger than they have been portrayed in the past, and that the traditional boundary between Wu and Min is considerably weaker than has been supposed. The total sum of dialect facts cannot be ignored in trying to ascertain the language history of this area; it would appear that various elements of the traditional view of the history of the southern dialects are in error in various ways. In particular, it is at least possible that Wu and Min, in some sense, share a common ancestor not common to any other Chinese dialects.

This paper examines the emergence of the representation of dialect with Chinese characters (fangyan wenzihua) on the Internet. The online dialect writing is primarily identified as a subject of Internet language and youth language study. The CMC discourse as a hybrid register mixing spoken and written language features facilitates the written use of oral dialect on the Internet. Deviating from the standard Chinese writing system, the Internet-savvy youth transcribe their native dialects on an ad hoc basis, which celebrates multiplicity, creativity, individuality and resists uniformity, standardization, and institutionalization. Taking the SHN website (www.shanghaining.com) as a case study, the paper discusses how the written Shanghai Wu words are explored to mark a distinct visual style and to articulate a distinct local youth identity. Furthermore, this paper examines the dominant strategy of phonetic borrowing in dialect transcription on the Internet. It is argued that diachronically, the youth’s phonocentric obsession tapped into the May Fourth tradition of the baihua vernacular movement that was heavily influenced by the European logocentrism; and synchronically, the celebration of dialect sound on the Internet echoes the contemporary soundscape of local dialects formed in the mass media in recent years.

AbstractIn contrast to well-studied prenominal relative clauses (RCs) in Chinese, little has been known about postnominal RCs that are non-canonical but existent in spoken Chinese. Focusing on Standard Mandarin, this paper examines in a large-scale spoken corpus the distributional patterns of postnominal RCs. Using distribution patterns of prenominal RCs in existing corpus studies as benchmarks, we show that postnominal RCs in our spoken corpus of Standard Mandarin tend to modify sentential objects more frequently than sentential subjects, and that they are likely to be short, with extremely rare presence of aspect markers. Based on these patterns, we propose that postnominal RCs in Standard Mandarin are mostly afterthoughts, motivated by information structure of spoken languages and word order principles. To better understand their general coverage, we further investigate postnominal RCs in Chinese dialects using available resources, including Yue, Min, Xiang, and Wu, followed by a raw comparison of cross-dialectal similarities and differences. We conclude that postnominal RCs in Chinese are similarly motivated, but their degrees of grammaticalization vary.

Identical topic (IT henceforth) was previously known as copying topic (Xu & Liu (1998:141-157). It is fully or partially identical to a corresponding element (CE henceforth) occurring in the following part of the clause. Broadly speaking, IT is semantically empty. Being an unusual type of adding, it properly falls into the central concern of this volume. It seems IT can be attested in all Chinese dialects, though the phenomena in question have been poorly documented and have scarcely been studied under a unified category. IT seems to be a better candidate to characterise topic prominent languages than many other topic types including the non-gap topic, which has long been called "Chinese style topic" since Chafe (1976) and has been viewed as a major characteristic of topic prominent languages (e.g., Li & Thompson, 1976, Xu & Langendoen 1985, Gasde 1999). I believe the study of IT structure is necessary to obtain a clearer and more complete picture of topic structure in general. As far as I know, Wu dialects of Chinese, including Shanghainese, are the ones which have the richest IT types and the greatest text frequency of IT. Therefore, this study will be based on both Mandarin and Shanghainese data.

Abstract Diphthongization and apicalization are two commonly detected phonetic and/or phonological processes for the development of high vowels, with the process of apicalization being of particular importance to the phonology of Chinese dialects. This paper describes acoustics and articulation of fricative vowels in the Suzhou dialect of Wu Chinese. Acquiring frication initiates the sound change. The production of fricative vowels in Suzhou is characterized by visible turbulent frication from the spectrograms, and a significant lower Harmonics-to-Noise Ratio vis-à-vis the plain counterparts. The acoustic study suggests that spectral characteristics of fricative vowels play a more important role in defining the vowel contrasts. The fricative high front vowels have comparatively greater F1 and smaller F2 and F3 values than their plain counterparts, and in the acoustic F1/F2 plane, the fricative vowels are located in an intermediate position between their plain and apical counterparts. The articulatory study revealed that that not only tongue dorsum but also tongue blade are involved in the production of fricative high front vowels in Suzhou. Phonologically, plain high front vowels, fricative high front vowels, and apical vowels distinguish in active place of articulation, namely being anterodorsal, laminal, and apical respectively; and frication becomes a concomitant and redundant feature in the production of fricative or apical vowels. It is concluded that the fine-grained phonetic details suggest that the fricative high front vowels in Suzhou is at an intermediate stage of vowel apicalization in terms of both acoustics and articulation.

AbstractIn this paper, we examine the characteristics of unaccusative ‘give’ constructions in Chinese, and additionally identify the pathways for their emergence in some Chinese dialects, in particular Southern Min and Mandarin varieties.In this paper, the termsdialectandvarietyare sometimes used interchangeably, with the termvarietybeing the more general term that can also include variations within dialects.We distinguish between Type 1 and Type 2 unaccusative ‘give’ constructions, the former involving reversible ‘escape’-type intransitive predicates, and the latter irreversible ‘die’-type intransitive predicates. Type 1 constructions are attested in many Chinese varieties, such as Mandarin, Min, Wu, Hui, Hakka and Cantonese, whereas Type 2 constructions are more rare and thus far are mainly attested in Southern Min and some Mandarin varieties. Two major pathways in the development of unaccusative ‘give’ constructions are identified in this paper, namely, the causative pathway and the passive-mediated pathway. Our analysis also traces how the unaccusative ‘give’ construction develops into a marker of adversity and speaker affectedness. The findings of this study have implications for understanding the relationship between changes in valence (i.e., the number of core arguments that are profiled in a given construction) and speaker’s subjective stance.

In Shanghai Chinese as well as many other Wu dialects, breathy voice is a well-documented accompaniment of the low-register tone syllables with obstruent as well as sonorant onsets. But Shanghai Chinese is rapidly changing and the breathy voice associated with low-register tones tends to disappear in young speakers’ productions. In this study, we asked whether breathy voice is nevertheless still perceived and whether it pushes tone identification toward low-register tones. We conducted forced-choice tone identification tests on young native listeners of Shanghai Chinese, using low–high register tone continua—from tone T3 (23) to tone T2 (34)—imposed on base syllables with either modal or breathy voice quality, and beginning with various onset consonants. We used continua constructed from either naturally produced or synthesized syllables. Our results show that breathy voice does bias tone identification responses toward the low-register tone T3. This result held for both synthesized and natural stimuli, except for the /m/-onset stimuli derived from naturally produced syllables. We propose that the phonetic change at issue—loss of breathiness in production—is not due to misperception but reflects the ever-stronger influence of Standard Mandarin Chinese. In other words, this particular case of sound change seems to be led by production rather than perception. It remains an open question whether this kind of sound change is only determined by sociolinguistic factors (here, the dominance of Mandarin Chinese) or is independently motivated by phonetic and/or phonological factors.

Abstract One way to classify person systems across languages is by means of the semantic category of person and/or number, where person forms, with distinct referential values, are supposed to be in complementary distribution to each other. However, when we look into some finer details in a language-particular person system, i.e. that of the Puxian dialect in Chinese, there are person forms or expressions that are engaged in supplementary distribution and have meanings beyond what is literally said (Grice 1989). Different from previous approaches, which tended to analyze a person system into separate domains of study, e.g. reflexivity, intensification, logophoricity, empathy, etc., the author proposes that all the person-related meanings (semantics & pragmatics) constitute a “function inventory”, which has a stable structure called “inventory structure”. In the structure, each of the overtly expressed person meanings is assigned to a choice of node, from which multiple outcomes can be developed. The significance of this approach is that it tries to circumvent some pre-established categories and focuses instead on meaningful differences in a system (Sausurre 1983).

Purpose This study established the performance-intensity function for Beijing and Taiwan Mandarin bisyllabic word recognition tests in noise in native speakers of Wu Chinese. Effects of the test dialect and listeners' first language on psychometric variables (i.e., slope and 50%-correct threshold) were analyzed. Method Thirty-two normal-hearing Wu-speaking adults who used Mandarin since early childhood were compared to 16 native Mandarin-speaking adults. Both Beijing and Taiwan bisyllabic word recognition tests were presented at 8 signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) in 4-dB steps (−12 dB to +16 dB). At each SNR, a half list (25 words) was presented in speech-spectrum noise to listeners' right ear. The order of the test, SNR, and half list was randomized across listeners. Listeners responded orally and in writing. Results Overall, the Wu-speaking listeners performed comparably to the Mandarin-speaking listeners on both tests. Compared to the Taiwan test, the Beijing test yielded a significantly lower threshold for both the Mandarin- and Wu-speaking listeners, as well as a significantly steeper slope for the Wu-speaking listeners. Conclusion Both Mandarin tests can be used to evaluate Wu-speaking listeners. Of the 2, the Taiwan Mandarin test results in more comparable functions across listener groups. Differences in the performance-intensity function between listener groups and between tests indicate a first language and dialectal effect, respectively.

The areas in which Wu dialects are currently spoken, i.e. Shanghai, Zhejiang Province, Southern Jiangsu Province, Northeastern Jiangxi Province and neighboring areas, were all territories of the Wu and Yue States in the Pre-Qin Period. However, the present Wu dialects are not directly inherited and derived from the native languages spoken in the ancient Wu and Yue areas, as there has been a significant process of language transfer in this area historically. The source of influence mainly comes from Chu language, which led to the development of Eastern Yangtze River dialect first, and later the establishment of Wu dialects in the Tang Dynasty.

From the perspective of Chinese historical phonology, we observe that Hangzhou dialect in Zhejiang Province exemplifies the dualism of innovation and conservatism in terms of phonological evolution. Using the comparative method, three strata are recognized: 1. the conservative layer from Qieyun which also appears in modern Wu dialects; 2. the layer of Mandarin from the period of the late Tang Dynasty to Northern Song, which composes the main body of Hangzhou phonology; and 3. the innovative layer of post-Qieyun times both in Hangzhou and other Wu dialects.

There is a great number of question particles in Chinese dialects that can be traced back to the negatives bu 不 and wu 無, which appeared in the negative part of A-not-A questions before turning into question particles. It remains debatable when and how this change occurred. We pinpoint the time when these two negatives changed into question particles according to several criteria in this paper. The time when bu became used as a question particle can be roughly dated to the Later Han dynasty and that of wu to the Tang dynasty, and the characters for these two words were then replaced by others. The interaction between bu and wu in history draws a picture of dynamic interaction. Some dialects show an extension from bu to wu, and some the other way round; the former is predominant in Middle Chinese, and the latter after the Tang dynasty. The way that bu changed into a question particle appears different from wu, which can be depicted as follows: The negative bu might have been seen as equivalent to the question particles hu 乎 and ye 耶 by holding a position identical to these two particles, which lost their function of interrogation and, as a result, were supplanted by bu subsequently. As a negative, wu is not only parallel with bu in syntactic behaviors, but also overlaps with the latter in the history, which made wu turn into a question particle after bu had done so.

Tone and accent share a key phonetic property, namely pitch prominence. It is therefore not surprising that the tonal and accentual systems overlap, and that languages may develop in either direction along this tone-ac cent continuum. In this paper I argue that at least one dialect of Chinese, notably the New Chongming dialect of the northern Wu group, has evolved from a prototypically tonallanguage to an unmistakably accentual system according to such diagnostics as: culminativity, syntagmatic vs. paradigmatic contrast, weight-sensitive prominence, and avoidance of tonic dash (analogue of stress dash).

In this paper we summarize and analyze the phonetic and phonological features of the Hangzhou dialect, and identify 11 features that derive from ancient Mandarin. The author argues that both ancient Wu dialects and Mandarin Chinese strata can be found in the Hangzhou Dialect, which is a creole created in the Southern Song Dynasty. The Hangzhou Dialect is therefore of great significance in the study of the history of Mandarin Chinese and its creoles.

This paper examines the nature of ‘tone spreading’ in Daishan , a northern Wu dialect of Chinese, from the viewpoint of acoustic phonetics. It compares the mean falling fundamental frequency (FO) contour of disyllabic lexical items with that of monosyllabic citation forms in order to investigate if they are the same. The result shows that they are nearly identical, and therefore, demonstrates phonetic tone spreading as well as phonological tone spreading Acoustic data from Mende (Kupa Mende : Sierra Leone) are then presented and contrasted with those of Daishan. It is shown that the contouricity of the F О in fact differs between these two varieties. This result brings into question the autosegmentally based representation of tones using non-contour features such as HL, which has been commonly applied to the analysis of Wu tone sandhi. Finally, it is suggested that unitary contour features of tone, such as [falling], be applied in the case of Daishan tone spreading.

This paper attempts to reconstruct the history of Chinese words for “knee” by using the methodology of linguistic geography. Word forms are classified into five major types according to morphological features, and then their geographical distributions are observed. Observation suggests that dialect contact produces various types of “contaminated” forms (linguistic blends) in Chinese dialects. Three types of blend formations are discernible: prefixed, infixed and suffixed types. As a rule, the dialects accept part of the new form, which is transmitted from the adjacent areas, as conforming to the morphology of the original form. The suffixed-type blending is currently distributed along the Changjiang basin. The infixed-type is typical of the Wu dialects, which is assumed to have accepted the northern form [kʰɑ] as the second component of a trisyllabic structure. The prefixed-type is currently observable in some northern dialects, and it is assumed that the same process might have once occurred in the northern area, where the unaspirated prefix [kɑk] changed to the aspirated one, i.e., [kʰɑk], due to contamination by the form [kʰɑ]. The etymology and historical formation of the newest type, “p-l-k” > “k-l-p”, is also discussed. Finally, historical changes of the “knee” forms are reconstructed.

The dentilabialization of bilabial initial consonants in Middle Chinese is one of the important phonemic changes in the Tang Period. The condition for this change was that the word must have (1) a semivowel medial /i/ and (2) a main back vowel. The phonetic effect of (2) is that, as Chao (1940) has pointed out, a retracted position of the jaw would bring about the dentilabial contact, and the effect of (1) is that the palatalization of the consonant would enlarge the width of the contact. The fact that nasal /m/ in the rimes Dong III (東三) and You (尤) exceptionally did not receive dentilabialization could be explained by assuming a phonetic weakening of /i/ under the assimilation of rounded endings /wŋ/ and /u/. In the Wu and the Yue dialects /m/ generally was not dentilabialized. This may be related with the fact that these southern dialects have never experienced denazalization of nasal initials as in the Mandarin dialects. The dentilabialization in the phonemic sense should be regarded as a result of the merging of main vowels occurred in the middle of the Tang period.

This paper analyses the different phonological strata of first division unrounded finals of the Xiè Rhyme Group （蟹攝），specifically the Xai rhyme and Tài rhyme, in the finals system of proto-Min and explores the distinction between double rhymes in old Jiangdong dialects. Norman (1981) reconstructed five finals for Xai rhyme and Tài rhyme. They are:*əi for Xai 菜咍栽咍來咍 *oi for Xai 袋咍 *ɑi for Tài 帶泰蔡泰蓋泰 *uəi for Xai 改咍 *yəi for Xai 開咍 According to Norman’s reconstruction, there are four finals for the Xai rhyme but there is only one final for the Tài rhyme. Therefore, some issues need to be clarified. To begin with, what is the time sequence of those four forms of Xai? Additionally, three forms are reconstructed by one cognate in proto-Min. It is highly doubtful to regard those forms as a single stratum individually. Furthermore, the double rhymes, Xai and Tài, could be distinct in the Qieyun system but merged in most modern Chinese dialects. However, some southern dialects retain the distinction (refer to Cao et al. 2000, Wang 2004 and Wu 2005). How is the distinction of double rhymes expressed in proto-Min? It is worth examining those questions in depth.The methodology of this paper is the comparative method. We would like to expand Min dialectal material and find more reliable cognates to reexamine Norman’s finals of Xai and Tài. From the perspective of historical development, proto-Min has several different phonological strata. After thoughtful and cautious analysis, those strata could be an important reference for the reconstruction of both Middle Chinese and Old Chinese. An important aim of this paper is to reconstruct the Jiangdong dialect, a southern Chinese dialect used in the Six Dynasties period, using proto-Min and related common dialect systems.In conclusion: 1. both Xai and Tài could be reconstructed as two forms in the finals system of Proto-Min. In brief, *-əi and *-oi are for Xai; *-ɑi and *-ai are for Tài. 2. from a diachronic development viewpoint,the pattern *-oi: *-ai reveals the distinction of Xai and Tài, i.e. double rhyme, in the Six Dynasties Jiangdong dialect. 3. Relatedly, the pattern *-əi: *-ɑi could be traced to differences between the Zhi group （之部） and Jì group （祭部） in Old Chinese.

抽象 本文主要討論宋室南渡之後，由官話區帶來的臨安官話對吳語詞彙、語法的影響。文章首先確定了某個成分是宋室南渡帶入吳語的工作假設：該成分來自官話而非吳語的固有形式，並且該成分是宋室南渡而非之前永嘉南渡帶入的。其次，文章舉了「東西」「項-」「立」「穿」「多少」及 V-neg-V 結構等六個詞彙、語法項作為例證，具體討論了臨安官話對吳語的影響。之後，文章從方言接觸的角度討論了所涉詞彙借用、語法複製、接觸模式等相關問題。

The variety of languages and cultures in the community will indirectly affect the acquisition and development of children's language. This will be seen when children change residence, where new dwellings, different variations or dialects. Like at the PAUD Nusantara University School Laboratory PGRI Kediri, most children from various regions, they are migrant families in the city of Kediri so that they need adaptation in the new environment including the language he will get. This study uses a qualitative descriptive approach, the purpose of which is to describe the acquisition of language of three-year-old in terms of cultural background and to describe the average length of speech of three-year-olds based on Mean Length of Utterance (MLU). The research subjects were four children from Tulungagung, Kediri, Malang and Surabaya. The results of speech analysis show that the average research subjects from Tulungagung, Malang, Kediri and Surabaya had an average MLU of 2.92 in stage VI, which meant that they were still at a low stage, which at the age of three was already at the stage VII 3.0-3.5 words per speech. Based on the results of the analysis, it is recommended that teachers and parents improve stimulation and find appropriate strategies for the acquisition and development of children's language. Keywords: Acquisition of children's language, Cultural background, Syntax Analysis References Bachri, C., & Maya, R. (2012). Pemerolehan Bahasa Anak Usia 7 Tahun 3 Bulan dalam bidang Sintaksis. Jurnal Edukasi Kultural. Chaer, A. (2003). Psikolinguistik: Kajian Teoritik. Jakarta: PT Rineka Cipta. Chaer, A., & Agustina, L. (2004). Sosiolinguistik Perkenalan Awal. Jakarta: PT Rineka Cipta. Chater, N., & Christianshen, H. M. (2018). Language acquisition as skill learning. Behavioral Science. Creswell, J. C. (2012). Introduction to Research Methods in Education. Los Angeles: Sage Publication. Darjowidjojo, S. (2010). Psikolinguistik (Pengatar Pemahaman Bahasa Manusia). Jakarta: Yayasan Obor Indonesia. Hakim, U. (2016). Studi Pemerolehan Bahasa pada Anak Usia 4 tahun (Kajian Sintaksis). Jurnal Linguistik Terapan. Hetherington, P. (2003). Psikologi Perkembangan Anak dan Remaja Terjemahan Soemitro. Jakarta: Universitas Indonesia. Hutabarat, I. (2018). Pemerolehan Sintaksis Bahasa Indonesia Anak Usia Dua Tahun Dan Tiga Tahun Di Padang Bulan. Jurnal Dharma Agung, Xxvi(1). Mahsun. (2005). Metode Penelitian Bahasa. Jakarta: PT Raja Grafindo Persada. Moleong, L. (2007). Metodologi Penelitian Kualitatif. Yogyakarta: PT Remaja Rosdakarya. Nurjamiaty. (2015). Pemerolehan Bahasa Anak Usia Tiga Tahun Berdasarkan Tontonan Kesukaannya Ditinjau Dari Kontruksi Semantik. Jurnal Edukasi Kultura, 2(2). Owens, R. G. (2008). Organizational Behavior in Education (4th Ed) III. New York: Allyn&Bacon. Rahardi, K. (2001). Sosiolinguistik, Kode, dan Alih Kode. Yogyakarta: Pustaka Pelajar. Roni, N. S. (2016). Panjang Rata-Rata Tuturan Anak Usia 2 Tahun 7 Bulan Dalam Bingkai Teori Pemerolehan Bahasa Anak. Jurnal Pendidikan2016. Salnita, Y. E., Atmazaki, & Abdurrahman. (2019). Language Acquisition for Early Childhood. Jurnal Obsesi, 3(1). Smith, A. (2010). Development of Vocabularry and Grammar in Young America Speaking Children Assessed with aAmerica Language Development Inventory. Sumarsono. (2013). Sosiolinguistik. Yogyakarta: Pustaka Pelajar. Sumarsono, & Partana, P. (2018). Sosiolinguistik. Yogyakarta: Pustaka Pelajar. Vissiennon, K., Friederic, A. D., Brauer, J., & Wu, C.-Y. (2016). Functional organization of the language network in three- and six-year-old children. Neuropsychologia.

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Lili Wu Chinese () is a Wu dialect (; ISO 639-3; code: wuu) spoken by approximately 38,000 people who reside in the town of Lili (), one of the ten major towns in the Wujiang district (). The Wujiang district belongs to the prefectural-level municipality of Suzhou city () in Jiangsu province (), the People’s Republic of China. It is located at the juncture area of the city of Shanghai (), the city of Suzhou, and the city of Jiaxing (), as shown in Figure 1.

This study investigates the acoustic and articulatory properties of phonation contrast in Shanghainese, the most thoroughly studied Chinese Wu dialect. Although previous studies generally suggest that the non-modal phonation associated with the lower register in Shanghainese is relatively breathier, it is unclear whether it is ‘breathy voice’, ‘slack voice’ or ‘whispery voice’. This study aims to provide a better understanding of the phonetic realization of the non-modal phonation in Shanghainese. Simultaneous audio and electroglottographic recordings were made from 52 speakers born before 1980. Both acoustic and articulatory data confirmed that the non-modal phonation in Shanghainese is produced with relatively less glottal constriction and more aperiodic noise than the modal phonation. The novel finding of this study is that aperiodic noise plays a much more important role than spectral measures (i.e. indicators of glottal constriction) in the phonetic realization of the non-modal phonation. This property is distinct from the breathier voices in Gujarati, White Hmong and Southern Yi. These results suggest that the non-modal phonation in Shanghainese should be characterized as ‘whispery voice’, which is phonetically distinct from both ‘breathy voice’ and ‘slack voice’.

This paper provides an explanation for yinchuyangshou 陰出陽收 in Duquxuzhi 度曲須知 written by Shen Chongsui 沈寵綏 in the Ming Dynasty. Based on the reconstruction, we propose that yinchuyangshou is designed to help speakers of the Wu dialects to learn the sound feature [voiceless fricative] in Mandarin. This explanation not only reflects the contact between Mandarin and Wu dialects, but is also in keeping with the acoustic analysis of xia 匣 initial in the modern Suzhou dialect. 本文主要認為沈寵綏《度曲須知》中所謂“陰出陽收”之概念，是要求吳人在唱曲時，注意某些字需要向當時已經發生濁音清化、並有“平送仄不送”的北方官話學習[清擦音]的特徵，這是“陰出”；而“陽收”則是指保持吳語本有陽平聲調的發音特性。“陰出陽收”和吳語的“清音濁流”關係不大。文章從沈氏論著的內部證據出發，按照其標注體系的一致性，結合現代語音學的分類，歸納出630個例字在北方話中都含有[清擦音]的統一聲學特徵。又從今蘇州方言的角度出發，通過歷時比較，證明了這種觀點。最後分析了蘇州方言匣母字的歷時變化，認為“陰出陽收”與今蘇州部分匣母 [hɦ] 的讀音有關，是一種人為的語言接觸，明朝中葉蘇州方言的匣母字應該就是吳語的原生一分類型 [ɦ]。(This article is in Chinese.)