| Nucleus,as an important part in intonation,can indicate where the information focus is so as to make people know the key information.What's more,it can influence the grammaticality and the syntactic structures of what is being said and indicate our attitudes to other people and reactions to the events.With correct nucleus placement,people will have an efficient conversation so as to build harmonious social relationship.However,English is a stress-timed language and Chinese is a syllable-timed language,and the neutral tone in Chinese is different from the unstressed forms in English,so it is natural that EFL learners and foreigners have some difficulties in producing and comprehending English and Chinese respectively.In order to make people have a better understanding of nucleus placement,this paper,based on Three-T Theory and Contrastive Study Theory,makes a comparative study of English and Chinese nucleus placement concerning functions and rules,and then intends to find whether there are some similarities and differences.The result was mainly detected by searching for resources about the nucleus placement from the scholars' books and some papers downloaded from the CNKI,and there are some typical examples adopted from the book named Book 1,New Concept English and New Madarin Course — a Chinese Madarin book.In terms of the sentence types in both books,there are many sentences having sound recordings,such as yes-no questions,wh-questioning sentences,imperative sentences and exclamatory sentences,etc.,thus I think these sentences are good materials for studying English and Chinese nucleus placement.Besides,recently many scholars have done some comparative studies of English and Chinese from the aspect of stress,syntactic structures and rhetorical features,etc.and even done some empirical experiments,so some contents about English and Chinese nucleus placement were studied by synthesizing the previous research achievements.Through analysis,this thesis concluded such results as follows:1.There are indeed some similarities and differences between English and Chinese nucleus placement in terms of functions and rules.2.In terms of functions,three kinds of functions are identified in both two languages,namely semantic function,attitudinal function and grammatical function,but there are some differences among the manifestation of these functions in both languages.3.In both languages,nucleus placement can be divided into unmarked nucleus placement and marked nucleus placement.Similarly,information focus can be classified into unmarked focus,marked focus and contrastive focus.The general rule for unmarked nucleus in both languages is to place it on the last lexical item,but the main difference between these two languages is reflected in compounds,i.e.English has single-stressed compounds with the nucleus being on the stressed syllable of the first element and double-stressed compounds with the nucleus on the stressed syllable of the second element,while in Chinese,the constituents of the disyllabic compounds can't be judged as being stronger acoustically.What's more,there is no definite agreement on the rules of the disyllabic word stress;thereby the compounds in Chinese the author talks about are trisyllabic words whose nucleus is generally placed on the last stressed lexical element.As for marked nucleus placement,new and old information,emphasis and idiomatic expressions can be the special circumstances governing the placing of nucleus,but there are also some differences in the specific manifestation forms between English and Chinese.Contrast is a common occasion which can influence the nucleus placement in both languages,but we tend to use fall-plus-rise nuclear tone to show contrast in English.All in all,whether the tonicity is unmarked or marked,it marks the information focus,therefore,language learners should learn some rules of nucleus placement and the ways to convey information correctly,so that they can further do self-evaluations and self-corrections to achieve a higher language level. |
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