Stress Placement Of Disyllabic Units In Beijing Mandarin--Metrical And Syntactic Interactions

The thesis investigates the stress placement of Chinese disyllabic units. Stress placement is one of the most interesting phonological phenomena in Chinese, which has attracted great attention among researchers and scholars at home and abroad. However, the views toward stress placement are always controversial:some scholars hold that Chinese stress is left-headed (Duanmu 1990,2006;Lin 2001; Wang and Feng 2006, among many others); while some believe that stress is right-headed (Chao 1968; Lin et al 1984; Lin 1985; Yan and Lin 1988; Shen 1990). This thesis is to investigate the issue from the perspective of metrical stress theory and syntactic theory. To discuss the stress placement, the thesis first explains the syllable structure and foot formation on assumption that Chinese syllable is monomoraic (Feng 1998) and foot is trochaic (Duanmu 1999,2004,2006). However, the metrical stress theory alone cannot explicitly explain the stress phenomenon in Chinese. The thesis presents systematic and analytic discussions about the influence of syntax on foot formation, the impact of stress placement upon such phonological changes as vowel reduction and tone sandhi. Based on the discussion and analysis made through the thesis, the thesis claims that stress placement in Chinese is constrained by syntax in that syntax influences foot formation. As a conclusion, the thesis holds that stress placement, vowel reduction and tonal behavior are closely related and that unstressed vowels undergo vowel reduction, which in turn causes tonal changes in Chinese.This thesis has seven chapters. Chapter One offers a general background, including a brief introduction of the phonological characteristics of the Chinese language and the theories applied in the thesis:the metrical stress theory and syntactic theory. Chapter Two discusses in detail the metrical stress theory, focusing on syllable weight and foot types on the one hand and syntactic structures on the other. Chapter Three reviews previous studies on foot formation and stress placement in Chinese, and presents my own opinions of them. Chapter Four offers a systematic analysis of stress placement in Chinese disyllabic units. Chapter Five discusses the correlation of stress placement, vowel reduction, and tonal change of Chinese. Chapter Six provides explanations of the difficulty in stress judgment in disyllabic compounds in Chinese, and presents a conclusion.