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17 - Evidence for Stress and Metrical Structure in Chinese

from Part Three - Phonetic-phonological Issues in Chinese

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2022

By
San Duanmu
Edited by
Chu-Ren Huang ,
Yen-Hwei Lin ,
I-Hsuan Chen  and
Yu-Yin Hsu
Chu-Ren Huang
Affiliation:
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Yen-Hwei Lin
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
I-Hsuan Chen
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
Yu-Yin Hsu
Affiliation:
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
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Summary

There is a common view that English has word stress but Chinese does not. I examine perceived stress in disyllabic lexical entries and show two similarities between the languages: (i) when both syllables carry a designated tone, such as such as bamboo or Red Cross in English, or 北京 Beijing ‘Beijing’ in Chinese, main stress is unclear to native speakers; and (ii) when just one syllable has a designated tone, such as yoga, magpie, or about in English, or 爸_爸 ba_ba [paː][pə] ‘pa_pa (papa)’ in Chinese, it is clearly perceived to carry main stress. However, case (ii) covers 86% of disyllabic entries in English but just 5% in Chinese. The difference is attributable to the independent fact that Chinese is a tone language, in which syllables with secondary stress also carry a designated tone, whereas in English they usually do not. I also show that English and Chinese share two further similarities: First, stressed and unstressed syllables are acoustically different, and second, stress plays other phonological roles, such as phrasal stress, contrastive stress, and meter in poetry.

Keywords

stressdesignated tonemorafootdual trochees
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Chinese Linguistics , pp. 361 - 382
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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