A Comparative Study Of Major Word Stress Theories In Standard Chinese

In any language you listen to, you will notice that some syllables sound stronger and more noticeable than others. In English, for example, the middle syllable of the word 'tomato' is clearly stronger than the first and last syllables. We say that the middle syllable is stressed.In the study of phonetics and phonology, stress has always been the focus of researchers' work. For some languages, stress is easy to feel, such as English. However, stress in other languages is less obvious. Chinese belongs to the latter kind. As people pay more attention on the research of stress in Standard Chinese (SC) during recent years, using phonetic experiments to analyze the stress in SC has become the mainstream.There are two important theories about the SC stress patterns: the final stress theory and the left-headed stress theory. Each one has its own supporters consisted of domestic and foreign linguists. The thesis' aim is to find out which one is more powerful in explaining the SC word stress. After the comparative study, it is interesting to see that each one has its own system and the system can explain the SC stress phenomenon. However, after analyzing the two theories, the author finds out that each theory has its own flaws. Moreover, the author intends to find out the specialty of Chinese language and the reason why the stress of SC is hard to perceive.Finally, the author gives an idea about further discussion. Since nowadays theories both have their own weakness, we may try to do the research from the cognitive point of view, doing some mental research, maybe we may get a perfect answer for the SC stress pattern.