THE COMPETITION AMONG THE PHONETIC STRATA IN THE SOUTH MIN SPOKEN IN TAIWAN

• Main Authors: Huang, Yu-Mei, 黃玉梅
• Other Authors: Lu, Ching-Ching
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2001
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/01212650794856793885

碩士 === 國立新竹師範學院 === 臺灣語言與語文教育研究所 === 89 === Language is a tool for social communication, and also a structure of persistent variation. Language, due to the variability, has its unique features and the rules of changing. Due to the people’s migration and the effect of dialect merging and assimilation, there existed complicated problems about language strata─the results of language history. The different strata in the language co-exist contemporary and show a dynamic competitive process as time goes by. There were three experiments in this thesis. The first experiment was designed by two variable, sex and age, from the viewpoint of sociolinguistics, to find the competition between two phonetic strata (shown in the selection tendency between the literary and colloquial pronunciations) in current Southern Min dialect spoken in Taiwan. We found that the selection tendencies between two generations were different. The second experiment, which followed the first one, was to examine the influential parameters for the selection tendency. The results showed that the words of high frequency played and important role. And the phenomenon of “Lexical Diffusion” was also observed. The same character might have different variation rate of selection tendency in phonetic strata competition. The third experiment was focused on the influence contributed from Mandarin homophones, whose pronunciation was activated by the target character, which was supposed to be read in Southern Min by the subjects. Those Mandarin homophones may result in wrong analogies during the process when the subjects were asked to read in Southern Min. The results help us to make clear the error patterns found in the first experiment. Key word: Southern Min, literary and colloquial pronunciation, language strata, lexical diffusion, language change