A Phono-Morphological Study on Jin Hua Dialect (Published)
This paper discusses the phono-morphological feature of Jin Hua dialect, a city that is located in the central region of Zhejiang Province, China. Phonologically, the dialect contains 27 consonants and 51 vowels. The consonants ‘R’ and ‘L’ are not distinguished, i.e. all words with the starting consonant ‘R’ are pronounced ‘L’. Phonetic change occurs to nouns whose pronunciations end with /an/; /ia/; /a/; /e/. Precisely, four transition patterns have been confirmed: (I) /an/ → /a/; (II) /ia/ → /uá/, /a/; (III) /a/, /an/, /e/ → /iá/; (IV) /e/ → /á/. Furthermore, vowel nasalisation results from the weakening of nasal-coloring in Wú dialect and appears to be limited to pronouns. Syntactically, the word order of an adverbial phrase is [Adj + Adv], which in standard Chinese would be: [Adv + Adj]. This accidently resembles the Thai language, Vietnamese and French. Deictic, i.e. 来 lái ‘come’ and 去 qù ‘go’, are extensively employed as modal particles in motion as well as change-of-state constructions. Another dialectal habit comes from the focus particle 添 tiān ‘one more time’. It is often added to the end of the sentence in order to emphasise the utterer’s opinion.
Keywords: Dialect, Morphology, Phonology