A Contrastive Study On Rhythm Of News Broadcast In English And Chinese

Rhythm is one of the important suprasegmental features, which plays a crucial part in language acquisition. However, English rhythm is one of the most widely encountered difficulties for Chinese learners of English. This is probably because the rhythm of English is quite different from that of Chinese. English has been considered to be a stress-timed language, which means the stressed syllables tend to occur at regular intervals while Chinese has been regarded as a syllable-timed language in which each syllable inclines to occupy equal duration.This thesis, through the experiment on the news broadcast selected from Voice of America (VOA) and China National Radio (CNR) with Praat–a software program for acoustic analysis of speech in phonetics, tries to figure out the rhythmic differences between English and Chinese on news broadcast from the perspective of duration. The experiment calculates the durations of inter-stress intervals of twenty sentences chosen from VOA news and syllable durations of twenty sentences selected from CNR news. Then we investigate mean durations, standard deviations, and coefficient of variations of two types of data.It is found that (1) VOA news tends to be stress-timed while CNR news has a strong syllable-timed tendency; (2) both the durations of inter-stress intervals of VOA news and the syllable durations of CNR news are not absolutely isochronous. Thus, according to The Theory of Continuum, these two types of rhythms of news broadcast can be arranged on two sides of a continuum, on which the rhythm of VOA news is close to stress-timed end point and CNR news to the syllable-timed one. This thesis also analyzes the factors that maintain the rhythmic patterns of news broadcast in two languages. Main factors maintaining English news are liaison, elision, and adjustments in the length of sounds. All these factors might make multi-syllable feet in English news shorter in order to keep the stressed-timed rhythm. And main factors maintaining Chinese news are simple syllable structure and the important functions of tone especially demarcative function,which can make strong syllable-timed tendency possible. This study will not only be beneficial to the study of rhythmic differences between the two languages, but also be helpful for Chinese students to acquire correct rhythm of English.