De-stressed words in Mandarin – a parallel with English

0451639 - OÚ 2016 US eng C - Konferenční příspěvek (zahraniční konf.)
Třísková, Hana
De-stressed words in Mandarin – a parallel with English.
Proceedings of the 27th North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics. Los Angeles: University of California Los Angeles, 2015 - (Tao, H.), s. 287-304
[North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL-27). Los Angeles (US), 03.04.2015-05.05.2015]
Institucionální podpora: RVO:68378009
Klíčová slova: Mandarin Chinese * pronunciation * phonetics * clitics * function words * language teaching
Kód oboru RIV: AI - Jazykověda
http://naccl.osu.edu/proceedings/naccl-27

In Teaching Chinese as a second language the teachers tend to encourage the beginning students to enunciate each morpheme / character and pronounce it with full tone (except for the neutral tone syllables). However, everyday colloquial putonghua sounds quite different. In rapid speech many words (syllables) display various signs of phonetic erosion as a result of being de-stressed. Namely: reduction or even deletion of tone, shortened duration, weakened articulation of vowels and/or consonants, and reduction of loudness. De-stressed realization is particularly typical for high frequency monosyllabic function words such as personal pronouns, measure words, conjunctions, prepositions, monosyllabic postpositions 上, 下, the verbs 是, 在, exist. 有, and grammaticalized adverbs 很, 都, 就. They have two forms in pronunciation. In most contexts they are pronounced as de-stressed, e.g. tā 他 in Nǐ gàosu tā! (“weak form” [thə]). Stressed, full realizations occur much less commonly, being mostly reserved for cases such as logical / contrastive stress: Nǐ gàosu tā, bié gàosu wǒ! (“strong form” [thaː]1). This ɡroup of function words is assigned a newly coined term: “the cliticoids” 类附着词 (i.e. the words which mostly behave as clitics, but not always). Analogy between the cliticoids and “words with weak forms” found in English is suggested (prepositions, personal pronouns, auxiliary verbs, articles etc.). The students often tend to use “all-strong-form” pronunciation of the cliticoids. This leads to clearly foreign accent, blurrs the pragmatic meaning of the utterance and may cause ambiguity and misunderstanding by a listener. Moreover, unfamiliarity with weak forms often causes problems in speech perception. The paper attempts to provide a taxonomy of the cliticoids and points out their importance in L2 teaching.
Trvalý link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0255547