A Contrastive Study Of The Suprasegmental Features Of English And Chinese

Contrastive analysis is to find the similarities and differences by contrasting the mother language and target language, which supplies the effective and reliable foundation for EFL teaching. Contrastive phonology is considered by many scholars as one of the most basic sub-branches of contrastive linguistics. Most of the English research papers and books on English phonetics and phonology for Chinese students mainly introduced the pronunciation of English vowels and consonants in the early period. But these researches belong to the contrastive study of segmental phonemes, lacking the systematic contrastive research of suprasegmental features. However, with the development of phonology and contrastive linguistics, linguists have tried many ways to make contrastive analysis of phonetics between English and Chinese. Meanwhile, in English phonology teaching practice, some scholars find that most Chinese students feel difficult in only a few vowels and consonants when they are learning English pronunciation. Besides, if we want to speak English fluently, we should not only pronounce the separate vowels or consonants, but coherent speech flow, which involves the suprasegmental features, such as stress, rhythm, sound change, intonation, etc. And it shows that suprasegmental features can help people to communicate more easily. In recent years, many language researchers (He Shanfen 1997, Chen Ying 2001, Wang Yanyu 2001, Yu Yanmei 2004, Li Fangfang 2006) think that suprasegmentals are more important than segmentals in verbal communication, and they 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.The research objectives include main aspects of suprasegmental features in English and Chinese, i.e., stress, pause, sound change, rhythm, tone and intonation. The author adopts the contrastive analysis approach to make a contrastive analysis of suprasegmental features in different levels from proper perspectives.The author hopes that the thesis could be valuable to English teaching and research in China, especially could be helpful to English suprasegmental features teaching.