Contrastive Study Of Suprasegmental Phonology In English And Chinese: A Functional Perspective

Contrastive phonology is always recognized by linguists as one of the most basic and effective sub-branches of Contrastive linguistics. Like the old English phonetics and phonology books in Britain or America, most of the textbooks on English phonetics and phonology for Chinese have a large space on the pronunciation of English vowels and consonants, with a detailed comparison between English and Chinese phonemes. Thus contrastive phonology of English and Chinese has been stayed at Contrastive study of segmental phonemes in the early stage. However, with the development of phonology and contrastive linguistics, the teaching practice of English phonology proves that Chinese students have difficulties in only a few vowels and consonants when they are learning English pronunciation. Moreover, people speak English not in separate vowels or consonants, but in connected sounds, which involves the suprasegmental features, such as stress, rhythm, intonation, etc. More and more linguists consider that suprasegmentals are more important than segmentals in verbal communication. The misunderstanding caused by the incorrect pronunciation of phonemes can be removed in shared contexts. Under the condition of the intelligible and acceptable pronunciation, suprasegmentals can give assistance in conveying meaning rather than segmentals. Therefore, with the alteration of the focus of phonetic study, the direction of contrastive analysis of phonology is shifted from the detailed comparison of vowels and consonants to the CA of syllable, stress, juncture, sound variation, and intonation. Of late years, many Chinese scholars make contrastive study of one or more suprasegmental features in English and Chinese in their works, but the studies are not so comprehensive and systematic. Many of them are restricted to the study of forms of suprasegmentals, but not involve the functions. This is why the author makes a contrastive study of suprasegmental phonology in English andChinese from a functional perspective.The author chooses three main aspects of suprasegmental features in English and Chinese which are closely related, i.e., stress, rhythm, intonation: and adopts the functional approach of contrastive analysis in the thesis. For stress and rhythm, the CA emphasizes their relationship with the other phonological and grammatical elements in utterance, and the roles they play in the relation. For intonation, the discussion focuses on its linguistic purpose, especially the communicative function.This dissertation comprises six chapters.Chapter 1 serves as an introduction, which includes the significance of the study and the organization of the dissertation.Chapter 2 is a brief survey of contrastive analysis and suprasegmental phonology. The chapter introduces the definition, development, objectives and approaches of CA, analyses the similarities and differences between phonetics and phonology, and expounds the definition, development, the significance and contents of CA of suprasegmental phonology.Chapter 3 gives the CA of stress in English and Chinese, which first describes the nature of stress and the different manifestations of four acoustic factors in English stress and Chinese stress. Stress is classified into word stress and sentence stress. For word stress, the chapter points out that stress is one of the outstanding features of English words while the neutral tone is more important than the stress in Chinese words, and compares the models and functions of word stress between English and Chinese. The similar functions of word stress are (i) distinguishing lexical meaning and class, and (ii) varying the pronunciation of words. The difference is that stress is the phonological symbol of wording in English, which is not so distinct in Chinese. Sentence stress is divided into unemphatic stress and emphatic stress. The former refers to sense stress, i.e. grammatical stress, and the latter includes logical stress and emotional stress. Both English and Chinese sentence stresses have semantic and syntactic functions. T...