Introduction to Chinese dialectology

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Introduction to Chinese Dialectology intends to give a comprehensive account of the studies on Chinese dialects tracing from the first Chinese dialect study of Yang Xiong's Fangyan "Dialect" to present works, covering mainly phonological and lexical features. It investigates the dialect research from historical and theoretical linguistic perspectives. Topics the classification of Chinese dialects, dialect studies in different periods, the criteria for the dialect classification as proposed by different scholars, discussions on the Chinese dialectology from philological, descriptive, generative and computational quantifying approaches, and the contributions of Chinese dialectology to the general linguistic theories. The main text devotes to the description of the major phonological characteristics and distributions of the major dialects, supplemented by fourteen sketch dialect maps and over one hundred tables of dialect data for easier reading and comparisons. Each chapter is supported by exercises, which basically is in the form of contrastive and comparative linguistic analysis nature.