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1 results

  • 17 - Evidence for Stress and Metrical Structure in Chinese

  • from Part Three - Phonetic-phonological Issues in Chinese
  • Edited by Chu-Ren Huang, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Yen-Hwei Lin, Michigan State University, I-Hsuan Chen, University of California, Berkeley, Yu-Yin Hsu, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Chinese Linguistics
    Published online:
    04 August 2022
    Print publication:
    18 August 2022, pp 361-382

  • 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.