A dictionary of word stress in Mandarin Chinese

[carlo]

I first heard about this being in the works several years ago, but it actually only came out in December 2009, and finally I bought a copy today. It’s called 普通话简明轻重格式词典, and it’s published by 上海音乐出版社.

dangdang.com

Trying to make this as non-confusing as possible.... Mandarin Chinese is a tonal language. However, the way tones are spoken varies a lot. Some tones are fuller than others: longer, more drawn-out, with a higher or lower pitch, a steeper fall etc. Neutral tones are at the opposite extreme: short, mangled, and with no pitch of their own.

Some of this variation is lexical: neutral tone words like 孩子 have a neutral tone no matter what happens (no amount of speaker excitement is going to give 子 its third tone back).

And it's not just the neutral tone. Take a couple of common 2-syllable words, like 罪犯 and 藝術. The first usually has a "half-fourth tone" in the first syllable (ie the range of pitch movement in zui4 is less than in fan4). The opposite happens with yi4shu4: everyone says a much fuller fourth tone with the first syllable than with the second.

So some say that putonghua has several lexical stress patterns: strong-neutral, strong-weak, and weak-strong. This is the first attempt I know of at compiling a reference dictionary of the way polysyllabic words in Mandarin Chinese are actually pronounced. I recommend it to anyone interested in improving Mandarin pronunciation, public speaking etc (especially students that feel they have mastered individual tones but want to learn more).

[roddy]

Interesting, thanks for the post.