新加坡华语"血"字的读音探析 = ANALYSIS OF THE PRONUNCIATION OF THE CHARACTER "XUE" IN SINGAPORE MANDARIN

Abstract

The linguistic situation in Singapore is richly diversified, and there is a local Mandarin variety developing its own norms, in phonology, grammar and vocabulary. Many research have been done regarding these areas but the research on phonology has achieved the greatest result. Besides describing the phonetic phenomenon, there has been research, such as the one on the Fifth Tone written by Chung-yu Chen that had conducted an experiment and gave an explanation to it. Although there has been such deep analysis about Singapore Mandarin's phonology, there is an area left untouched, which is how Singapore Mandarin deals with literary and colloquial readings that is a prominent feature of Chinese Language. There are many words in Chinese Language that have both literal and colloquial reading, but amongst them, there is a word that has another pronunciation besides the literal and colloquial reading, and that is the word written with the character jfil 'blood', which means there is three pronunciations for this word. The third pronunciation, besides the literal and colloquial reading, is found widely among Singaporean Chinese, regardless of their social backgrounds, and has the tendency of replacing the other two pronunciations, which is the literal and colloquial reading. However, this third pronunciation, that actually concedes with the law of phonological development before the middle ancient times in China, was not found in Modern Chinese Language. Thus, this third pronunciation could not have come from the language's internal development. Thus, there must be a reason for it to resurface and become the prevalent pronunciation in Singapore Mandarin and this will be examined in this thesis. Therefore, an investigation has been conducted to prove the prevalence of this pronunciation, while showing the relationship among the three pronunciations of jffl. 'blood' in Singapore Mandarin. Upon proving the dominance of the third pronunciation, this thesis attempts to explain the phenomenon, trace the source of this third pronunciation and to give reasons for its dominance in Singapore Mandarin.