An OT Analysis Of Wu Dialect Speaking Students' Stress Misplacement In Learning English Songs

Stress, a kernel suprasegmental features in English phonetic system, presents itself as a big challenge for second language learners in acquisition. Prieto, Santeru & Hirschberg(1995) points out that the proper distribution of stress exerts significant influence on the naturalness and semantic interpretation of natural utterances. English is known as a stress-timed language while Chinese is a syllable-timed language. This distinction leads to their differences in sentence stress. Therefore, many Chinese English learners are detected with an obvious foreign accent in their learning of English, which can be greatly attributed to the improper assignments of sentence stress.The existing empirical study on the acquisition of sentence stress is not much and previous literature about stress can be generally divided into three categories. The first category booms in the field of SLA, one kind of which is based on CAH and the other is on Interlanguage Hypothesis. The second category shows its concentration on phonetic level, in which are mainly basic descriptions of acoustic features through perceptive and productive experiments. The phonological studies in the third category are represented by linear studies based on SPE model and non-linear ones framed on metrical phonology. The literatures mentioned above are restricted on theoretical level or phonetic descriptions. Not so many specific empirical studies focus on Chinese English learners' distribution of sentence stress, especially those in learning English songs. The present study attempts to get the phonetic features of sentence stress in English songs through an experiment and meanwhile, take OT as theoretical framework to explore in-depth into the mechanism that governs Wu dialect speaking high school students' improper assignments of sentence stress in learning English songs.The central idea of OT is that different languages differ in their grammars because they have different rankings in their constraints, and the process for learners to acquire a new language only requires their re-ranking of those constraints. Based on this assumption, the author employs an empirical approach to first analyze the recordings collected with software Praat and then work out the constraint-ranking that influences Wu dialect speaking students' acquisition of sentence stress in English songs and the specific re-ranking patterns. The study aims to answer the following three questions:(1) What are the acoustic features of the improper English sentence stress produced by Wu dialect speaking students in learning English songs?(2) What are the relevant constraints to be used? And what constraint-ranking can be adopted to account for the stress misplacement that occurs in the process of Wu dialect speaking students' learning English songs?(3) Is there any re-ranking pattern of the identified constrains hierarchy to reflect Wu dialect speaking students' stress placement in learning English songs compared with the ranking of the native English speakers? If there is, what is the pattern? And the findings of the research demonstrate that:(1) The analysis of the recordings of Wu dialect speaking students and native English speakers presents differences concerning acoustic features(pitch, duration and intensity) of sentence stress, which contribute to the occurrence of foreign accent.(2) Six constraints are relevant to the present study and the constraint-ranking of *CLASH >> DEP-IO(P) >> NOP(OI) >> MAX-IO(P) >> ALIGN-IP-R >> ALIGN-IP-L can be adopted to explain Wu dialect speaking students' misplacement of sentence stress in learning English songs.(3) The constraint-ranking adopted by Wu dialect speaking students undergoes a process of re-ranking compared with that of the native English speakers. And the re-ranking process witnesses certain moving paths which are realized by two types of re-ranking patterns. The first pattern is that three constraints undergo a process of demotion, which are NOP(OI), DEP-IO(P) and *CLASH and their demotion degrees are presented in an increasing order. The second type of pattern is opposite to the first one, which involves a process of promotion. The only one constraint that gets promoted is MAX-IO(P).The present study is an exploration into Wu dialect speaking students' stress assignment in singing English songs on the basis of OT. So it will leave some inspiration on the relevant studies in the field of SLA and provide certain practical inspirations on English phonetic teaching in China.