Matthew’s PhD project involves using computational methods and cartographic techniques to explore, visualise and analyse dialectal variation.
The primary focus of my project is to develop a tone distance metric which allows dialectologists to calculate dialect distances on the tonal level. In addition, the study will address dialectological questions such as “do dialect boundaries exist?” and “what are transition dialects like?” for both tonal and segmental levels, using Yue as a case study. To address these questions, the project look at 100+ dialects, and the findings are aimed to be non-language-specific, while the methods are aimed to be applicable cross-linguistically.
The language-specific component of my project is to revisit the classification of Yue dialects (internal classification within Yue, and the Yue-Pinghua dichotomy).