The Study On Word Stress Patterns Of Disyllable Non-neutral Words In Mandarin

The study on stress patterns of non-neutral disyllable words in Mandarin is not only helpful to establish Mandarin phonetics theory, but also indispensable to develop the Mandarin Test, Teaching Chinese as a foreign language and the Speech Engineering.On the basis of reviewing the general theories on word stress and the study of Mandarin word stress, this dissertation has made phonetics and perceptualexperiments, employed a phonetics analysis software------Praat4.2.31 and StatisticalPackage for Social Sciences 11.0 to discover the stress patterns of non-neutral disyllable words in Mandarin and to analyze their factors.Some people have already made the same research as this dissertation, but thereare differences. This essay has selected the special language materials------words withsame syllables but in the opposite order. The words were then cut by syllables and put together in another order to make a new material for perceptual experiments. The method ensures that the same syllable appears as much in the first syllable of the words as in the last, which can reduce the side effects of the segment factors efficiently; meanwhile, the perceptual experiment helps the testees to judge the stress pattern with ease, which also makes the research objective and persuasive.It is suggested that:(1) The study on stress patterns of non-neutral disyllable words in Mandarin belongs to the field of prosodic phonology rather than that of lexicological phonology. As the object of this research, the stress patterns can only adjust the rhythm of words, which make speech more fluent, but can't change the meaning of words.(2) The tone combination is vital to the stress patterns of non-neutral disyllable words in Mandarin. There are certain stress patterns in the combinations with a third tone syllable or with two same tone syllables or with a second tone in the last syllable; while in other disyllable combination there is no stress pattern.(3) The stress patterns of non-neutral disyllable words in Mandarin is related to the speech context. The study indicates that the disyllable words are left-stressed when they are located in the beginning of a sentence or after an obvious pause in a sentence or read as a word; however, when they are in the end of a sentence or before an obvious pause in a sentence, there's no stress pattern.(4) The acoustic factors are of great importance to perceive the stress patterns...