Chinese prosodic transcription – a proposal

0507797 - OÚ 2020 eng C - Konferenční příspěvek (zahraniční konf.)
Třísková, Hana
Chinese prosodic transcription – a proposal.
[5th International Conference on Chinese as a Second Language Research. Hongkong (CN), 14.06.2018-16.06.2018]
Institucionální podpora: RVO:68378009
Klíčová slova: Chinese language * Mandarin * pronunciation * phonetics * prosody * second language teaching * prosodic transcription
Obor OECD: 6. Humanities and the Arts

Phonetic scripts record the segments (vowels and consonants) in one way or another. Suprasegmental (prosodic) features such as stress, grouping, or sentence intonation are recorded to a very limited degree (e.g. by sentence punctuation). In L2 teaching, labelling such features in the example setences, dialogues and texts could greatly improve students´ fluency and naturalness of their speech. Attempts to design a system of prosodic transcription for Mandarin for pedagogical purposes are scarce. Probably the most elaborate one (based on Hanyu Pinyin) was created by the Czech sinologist and phonetician, Prof. Oldřich Švarný (1920-2011). He labelles two features: degree of stress in syllables, and grouping of the lexical words into prosodic words and intonational units. His scale of stress has 6 degrees. It is an outcome of two successively applied parameters: 1. tone fullness: neutral tone – weak tone – full tone – emphasized tone; 2. +/- stressed. Present paper challenges both the number of stress degrees (proposing only four), and Švarný´s underlying phonological analysis. Principal points: 1) All tonal morphemes are inherently full, “stressed” by default. Their full, unreduced pronunciation is unmarked. 2) Some tonal morphemes are structurally prone to prosodic weakening, e.g. monosyllabic tonal function words (“the cliticoids”), such as prepositions, classifiers, personal pronouns, the verb 是 etc. 3) Prosodic weakening is related to semantic weakening, it is marked and serves specific functions. It can occur at any of the structural levels (morpheme / word / phrase / discourse).
Trvalý link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0301839