Stress In Chinese Language

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affects several areas. One of them are the results of SPEECH SYNTHESIS. Cao claims that the level of naturalness of synthesised speech is still not satisfying. The sentences sound rather monotonous, lacking a relative difference between fully articulated syllables and reduced syllables. “The major attention is on resolving local word stresses and main stress in a sentence, while the massive existence of the words pronounced without stress or of unstressed syllables is neglected.” She concludes that “at the time being, we still lack a comprehensive knowledge of the rules of stress and non-stress distribution in Chinese, especially of the occurrence of non-stress.” According to Cao, yet another area affected by insufficient research on non-stress …show more content…

(2002:126) suggest that, at least at the level of words, non-stress (instead of stress) is a crucial issue. They write: “In Chinese [i.e. in putonghua], the notion of stress and non-stress (轻重音) is considerably different from the Western languages. In Western languages, the focus is on the notion of stress. Except for the stressed syllable(s), all remaining syllables contained in a word are weakly stressed (弱重音) or unstressed (非重音). Chinese is the other way round: so called [sic!] stress (重音) in a word can only be [established] with regard and in opposition to non-stress (轻音); the stressed syllable does not have to be especially prominent (重读) at all.” We can interpret this idea in the following way. The words such as dòufu 豆腐 are perceived as trochee: the first syllable is felt as stressed, and the second syllable as unstressed. This impression is NOT due to the fact the first syllable, dòu, is pronounced as stressed, with an extra salience (enhancing the original features). Rather, it has to be attributed to the fact that the second syllable, fu, is unstressed (it has a neutral tone, short duration and possibly devoiced vowel; that means some of its inherent features are reduced or even deleted). In fact, tone 4 on the first syllable of dòufu may be realized as quite subdued, with a rather compressed pitch range a moderate duration, yet the word would still be perceived as trochee. Wang et al. (2002)’s observations about the importance of non-stress (instead of …show more content…

It appears that the notion of DE-STRESS is essentially important here. De-stressing leads to depriving particular syllables of some of their original, inherent features present in the lexicon (the motivated, though not common term de-stress conveniently reflects this process, unlike the neutral term non-stress). Phonological functions lie mainly in the presence of non-stress (lexical neutral tone being an obvious case), not in the presence of stress. Thus, if we leave aside emphasis , examining the process of STRESS ASSIGNMENT should better be replaced by examining the process of NON-STRESS ASSIGNMENT (the starting point of the analysis is thus different). In other words, an important task of the linguists appears to be to reveal the mechanism of and rules for de-stressing (reduction), rather than to find out which syllables become stressed (enhanced), to what particular degree and why. In my opinion, the reversed view of the issue may help to find the key to stress in Mandarin in future research. The present paper attempts to make a partial contribution to our understanding of the principles governing distribution of the unstressed syllables in connected

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