Linguistic Distance and Mutual Intelligibility Among Five Wu Dialects

1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-3-8440-3790-6
Verlag: Shaker

Buch, Englisch, 266 Seiten, PB, Format (B × H): 148 mm x 210 mm, Gewicht: 399 g

Reihe: Linguistik

The present study explores the mutual intelligibility among Wu dialects as a function of linguistic distance. On the one hand, it takes the perspective of phonology by reporting the segmental details of the five Wu dialects and making a phonological comparison among them, something which has not so far been explored to this extent. On the other hand, it aims to find the phonological predictors of mutual intelligibility, for which we have used Levenshtein distance, a new and hopefully a successful way to explore which types of segment, e.g. consonant or vowel, is the better predictor of the mutual intelligibility among Wu dialects. The study is expected to fill the gap between the scarce literature on the mutual intelligibility study of Wu Chinese and the fruitful research on mutual intelligibility studies on American languages, Germanic languages and Scandinavian languages.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Wang, Lu