| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation focuses on “PingYuan” Hakka dialect (平遠客家話, hereinafter as “PingYuan”), a language spoken by Lai’s families in HuKou township, HsinChu County, Taiwan. Lai’s PingYuan Hakka residents, had migrated generations from PingYuan County in Canton province, southern China. Though different from that of Taiwan’s SiXian(四縣) and HaiLu(海陸) Hakka accents, many similarities exists with each other in phonetics and lexicons. Most of syllabic units or ending sounds are with falling tone, and some specific vocabularies are still kept in daily life, plus lesser suffixes in the language, all the above are uncommon against other dialects. Although part of PingYuan’s phonetics and lexicons are getting similar to that of both SiXian and HaiLu’s, PingYuan still keeps its core phonetic and lexical features as we examined its old lexical stratum and vowels. This dissertation will illustrate PingYuan’s phonetic and lexical features with synchronic and diachronic linguistics comparison and analysis.
The study is divided into 7 chapters as:
Chapter I: Preface—details research motivation and goals, methodology,
bibliography, history, geometry and originality of the study objects.
Chapter II: PingYuan phonetic systems—the initials, finals, tones, character
readings and spoken forms, tone-variation in continuity, synaeresis(合音現象),
homophone…etc.
Chapter III: Diachronic linguistic comparison between PingYuan and medieval
Chinese languages, which enhance our understanding on language evolution.
Chapter IV: Explores PingYuan phonetic features on the initials, finals and tones.
Chapter V: Depicts PingYuan special syntactic and lexical studies, such as
reduplication, derivatives, semantics and extended expression.
Chapter VI: Lexical comparison between PingYuan and both SiXian and HaiLu’s.
Chapter VII: Conclusion of dissertation value and expectation. Field survey
PingYuan vocabularies were categorized and appendixed for reference.
The study reveals Taiwan’s PingYuan has been affected much more by HaiLu
than by SiXian hakka, yet most of the phonetic and lexical features of original
PingYuan in Canton are still kept in Lai’s families till today. Typical examples such
as-- “5553” as “mother”, and “233” as “spade”, were shown.
II
In the future, whether PingYuan to be affected by surrounding dialects via
language contact and interaction which may cause source language transformed
phonetically and lexically, or its special vocabularies to be kept, requires further
study and verification.
Key words: PingYuan Hakka language, reduplication, derivatives, semantics,
extended expression. | en_US |