Tone of sentences containing 呢 or 还是

[0x2eleven]

My Chinese book says that when using 还是 in a question, the pitch of the entire sentence should be high and the speed slow. It says that the options being presented in the sentence should be stressed, while the 还是 should be unstressed.

For example， in "你要我还是酒?" the 我 and 酒 should be emphasized.

My book also says all monosyllabic words before 呢 should be stressed. So, in “你呢"the 你 should be stressed.

Does anyone know if these rules are actually followed in real spoken Chinese?

[Yang]

As a native speaker, what I can tell is just, I never aware this nuance.

Especially 你呢. By rules you're right, 你 should be stressed, and 呢 must pronunce lightly. But it doesnt really matter if you dont. Now a lot of young people love to pronunce 你呢 both stressed, affected by the accent of taiwan and hongkong.

So my point is, the rules is logically correct, but in really life, nobody really care about these nuances.

[0x2eleven]

Great! Thanks for the help.

[Sarevok]

呢 doesn't have a tone by itself if used as a particle at the end of the sentence (which doesn't apply if it is a part of another word like 毛呢 for example). As such it cannot get stressed. The main characteristic of a "stress" in Chinese is lengthening the syllable, so the tone becomes more prominent. Therefore, 呢 and all other sentence end particles can't get stressed, because there is no tone to speak of...

I use the word stress here for simplification purposes only, it has nothing to do with stress in English or other European languages...

[TomC]

I have never heard of this before. I guess in theory a lot of things should happen when speaking, but when you are in full flow, i guess you just do what comes natural. At least, i haven't any significant differences when these words are included in speech.

[kellys]

take it easy. no need to go to that far. make sure you pronounce the right tone for each character.