What is it about?
It's a study on the use of Chinese syllable contraction using hand-drawn and GIS-aggregated perceptual maps and quantitative analysis.
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Why is it important?
It's the first sociolinguistic study of Chinese syllable contraction use. It's also the first attempt to implement perceptual maps to studying Chinese on a national scale. The results show that Chinese syllable contraction, especially the stereotyped contraction, indexes both region of origin and gender of the perceived contraction users and the perceivers as well.
Perspectives
It was fun collecting data for this project. I got the chances to talk to many young college students and understand what they think about the ever-changing language phenomena. Besides, I hope this article will sparkle more studies on sociolinguistic variables in Chinese. The scarce of literature when I started developing this project made me wish there was more studies on Chinese sociolinguistics.
Chenchen Xu
Michigan State University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The sociolinguistic meanings of syllable contraction in
Chinese, Asia-Pacific Language Variation, December 2017, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/aplv.16004.xu.
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