On rhythm and its effects on syntax and acceptability

[renzhe]

陳德聰, you could look at the links I posted in #18. That's probably all you can find on the internet. It's a very mysterious and little-researched topic, and there is little material on it. There's also "A Reference Grammar of Chinese Sentences with Exercises" by Henry Hung-Yeh Tiee which wikipedia references, but most of this is specialised literature, only available in print.

[陳德聰]

Read them, thank you, but as you said it is a very little-researched topic. The current literature is full of contradictions and unexplained "exceptions" to rules that don't necessarily make sense in the first place, so instead of jumping down the throat of everyone who questions the sacred "grammars" put out by past linguists (who by the way are wrong about things all the time), it would have been nice to see where the conversation went.

Too bad for me, I guess.

[OneEye]

I didn't see anybody jumping down anyone else's throat for "questioning the grammars." I saw someone with an academic background in linguistics (which he did not reveal), coming to a forum meant for learners of the language (not linguists), saying he was a beginner and then asking very technical questions which generally aren't especially relevant to beginners, and then scoffing at the answers because what, they weren't presented in the form of peer-reviewed journal articles? Or at least come with an exhaustive literature review? Most learners aren't concerned with this stuff beyond its practical application, and for the large majority of Chinese learners, this sort of thing doesn't become practical until a relatively high level of proficiency has been achieved.

renzhe nailed it:

I've already told you where to look -- journals and sinologists specialising in Mandarin grammar. Someone of your calibre surely has access to both, and this is what a linguist would do. You could find something like this or this. But I guess what you're doing is more effective -- hypothesising wild theories from one example, then lamenting that none of the comments are intellectual enough.

I'm sure he has colleagues who would have at least been able to point him in the right direction. That would have made a lot more sense. It really comes across to me as someone who needed an ego boost. Why else would you come to a lay forum and start throwing around citations left and right the way he did?

I personally think it's an interesting topic, and would have enjoyed seeing where it went if he hadn't been so condescending about the whole thing.

[li3wei1]

From this:

Is this the Comprehensive Grammar you're referring to? maybe you could summarise these generalisations for those of us who are getting by with just the Essential Grammar.

I agree that a bit more emphasis on these 'rules' should be made in textbooks, maybe not at the beginner level but 2nd or 3rd year. I'm not sure it's stress that's important, however; more like number of syllables.

He got this:

Yes, that's the book I cited. I wonder why you . . . think a beginner should content him/herself with learning the WRONG rhythms and then have to repair his/her pronunciation much later. Does that apply to Chinese only, or is it a didactic principle you would be prepared to defend in general? :-)

He may understand 12 languages, but he appears to struggle with English.

[hbuchtel]

Imagine if this had been the OP's first post:

I am a theoretical linguist with over thirty years of experience teaching languages and linguistics. I have just started to apply my professional knowledge to modern Mandarin Chinese, and am running into what I see as inconsistencies in one of my main resources, Yip & Rimmington's Comprehensive Grammar.

I have asked my native Chinese exchange partner to pronounce for me a list of examples of 2-syllable 'words', 2-syllable phrases/sentences, 3-syllable words, 3-syllable phrases, and a few very simple sentences including one of the examples in my earlier post: "wo3 zai4 bei3jing1 zhu4guo4". I chose examples in order to measure possible effects of tone on stress, and I offered my informant a number of options (not all the options, in the case of the longer expressions, but she was told to add one if necessary). The result of that little experiment is below. I have not 'parsed' any sequences of more than two syllables, but the stress values my informant has sanctioned (in bold) would, as far as I can see, enforce parsing sentences containing such expressions in ways that make me doubt whether the generalizations mentioned in Yip&Rimmington's chapter 26 (preference for trochees, syncopa, occassional dactyls, preference for Xx in final position, etc.) do have any real predictive power as filters on otherwise grammatically and lexically well-formed Chinese sentences.

Could somebody here, preferably native speakers, go over the examples and tell me whether they agree or disagree with the stress patterns described? Thanks.

Chinese Rhythm (50-year old native speaker of Mandarin from southern Taiwan who speaks near-native English and has two degrees from Taiwan's universities and an MA from a UK one. She knows I am interested in Mandarin only, and her pronunciation is, as far as I can tell, consistent with other sources I have consulted - CDs that come with textbooks, online dictionaries, online translation software, online text-to-speech software, etc.)

X= full stress, x = weaker stress

Pinyin Meaning Stress Pattern

(2-syllable words)

da4yi1 coat; overcoat Xx, XX, xX

wai4gong1 mother’s father Xx, XX, xX

kong1ci4 air Xx, XX, xX

gong1che1 bus Xx, XX, xX

fei1zhou1 Africa Xx, XX, xX

jie4shao4 introduce Xx, XX, xX

shi4gu4 accident Xx, XX, xX

ji4zhu4 remember Xx, XX, xX

man4bu4 walk; walkside Xx, XX, xX

shui4jiao4 sleep Xx, XX, xX

si4yue4 April Xx, XX, xX

gan3xie4 thank Xx, XX, xX

tang3xia4 lie down Xx, XX, xX

kao3shi4 exam Xx, XX, xX

hai2shi4 still Xx, XX, xX

jie2shu4 end; finish Xx, XX, xX

nü3shi4 Lady, Madam Xx, XX, xX

you3xie1 some Xx, XX, xX

zou3lu4 walk Xx, XX, xX

tong1guo4 pass (exam) Xx, XX, xX

2-syllable phrases:

jiao1 ke4 teach class Xx, XX, xX

kan4 shu1 read book Xx, XX, xX

chu1 qu4 go walk Xx, XX, xX

he1 cha2 drink tea Xx, XX, xX

he1 jiu3 drink alcohol Xx, XX, xX

xi3 shou3 wash hands Xx, XX, xX

2-syllable sentences:

zai4 jian4! again see! Xx, XX, xX

zao3 an1! good morning! Xx, XX, xX

qing3 wen4 Please ask question Xx, XX, xX

ni3 hao3! You well! Xx, XX, xX

3-syllable words:

fei1 ji1 chang3 airplane Xxx, XxX, xxX, xXx, XXx, xXX,…

ai4 hao4 zhe3 amateur Xxx, XxX, xxX, xXx, XXx, xXX,…

yuan2 zhu1 bi3 ball-point Xxx, XxX, xxX, xXx, XXx, xXX,…

tu2 shu1 guan3 library Xxx, XxX, xxX, xXx, XXx, xXX,…

shou3 feng1 qin2 accordion Xxx, XxX, xxX, xXx, XXx, xXX,…

3-syllable phrases:

he1 ka1fei1 drink coffee Xxx, XxX, xxX, xXx, XXx, xXX, XXX

zai4 bei3jing1 [be] in Beijing Xxx, XxX, xxX, xXx, XXx, xXX,…

zao3shang4 hao3! good morning Xxx, XxX, xxX, xXx, XXx, xXX,…

Simple sentences:

Wo3 zhu4 zai4 bei3jing1 xXxxX, XXxxX, XxxxX, XxxXx, XxXxx, etc.

Wo3 bu2 zhu4 zai4 bei3jing1 xXxxXx, XxXxXx, XxXxXx, xXX xXx, xXxXXX,… etc.

Wo3 zai4 bei3jing1 zhu4guo4 XxXxXx, xXxXXX, xxxXXx, xXxxXx, … etc.

wo3 jin1tian1 bu2 yao4 qu4 kan4 dian4ying3 xXxXXXXXx, xXXxXXXXx, xXxXxxxXx, …etc.

[Guest realmayo]

Yes, well, maybe we can be generous and guess that the OP is not a native speaker of English and didn't realise the tone he was conveying with what he wrote; that he is not all that used to push-back from others on topics that he has studied a lot; and isn't too familiar with online forums.

Anyway, 陳德聰 wants this conversation to continue but is unwilling to participate. Given that native speakers aren't exactly queuing up to answer the OP's list of questions I don't see why the rest of us can't engage in some more or less informed discussion around what is actually a really interesting topic.

I'd understood that as a general principle, in a regular sentence, the strongest stress is on the last syllable, the second-strongest stress is on the first syllable, and that's about it. You have to make the necessary allowances, i.e. no special intonation present in the sentence, and the syllables referred to are not unstressed syllables. Is this something people agree on?

Then there's the issue of how the combination of tones affects the stress on a syllable, particularly if you've got a two-syllable word and you are examining the stress in the second syllable -- what is the effect on that second syllable of (i) its own tone, and (ii) the tone of the first syllable?

Those two points are relevant to simple sentences with no particular intonation, i.e. where the speaker is not trying to use stress to emphasise one point of the sentence or convey extra meaning. Naturally, particular intonation will result in different stresses than in a regular sentence. Ta1 shi4 wo3 de nv3 peng2you. She's my girlfriend. As a regular statement, do other people hear the peng2 getting most stress, followed perhaps by the Ta1? But obviously if you stress the ta1 or the shi4 or the wo3, or nv3, the intonation changes in an important way.

Next is to work out what we mean by stress. I looked this up in a book, The Sounds of Chinese by Yen-Hwei Lin. Some bits:

Stress in SC [standard Chinese] is manifested mainly by the expansion of pitch range and time duration, and sometimes by an increase in loudness. Expansion of pitch range means that a high-pitched tone becomes even higher and a low-pitched tone becomes even lower in a stressed syllable; that is, the range of pitch space is enlarged when producing a stressed syllable....

...when each syllable in a word has a full tone, as in most words in SC, it is not clear which syllable is stressed... SC speakers' judgements of SC words without a neutral tone vary and are often inconsistent.

... Because of the difficulty in identifying phonetic stress in SC, in the literature some claim that SC has no stress in words without a neutral tone, and those who maintain that SC does have stress for all words disagree in whether the SC stress foot is left-dominant or right-dominant or can be both depending on different words.

I think I'm right that the OP was interested in whether there is a requirement to obey certain rules of rhythm which then impacts upon what is syntactically correct or not. But my sense is that it's not reasonable to address that without firming up an idea about how stress works in Chinese in the first place. However I'd guess at this stage that the answer is no.

However there's one other question I really can't understand and which may be relevant: there are some words in Chinese which must be followed by one-syllable words, and others which can only be followed by two-syllable ones. Is this just arbitrary -- i.e. this is how their usage has evolved and hearing it the other way just 'feels wrong'? Or is the requirement linked to the meaning? Or even the rhythm/stress?

[navaburo]

OP: chill out. You clearly are very well read and I respect that, but I think you'll find a warmer reception here if you try a somewhat less confrontational tone. That said, please don't leave. I appreciate what you are doing, and I look forward to constructive conversations with you as you continue your journey into the Chinese language.

With that out of the way: I have also been haunted by the question of how prosody works in Chinese with intonation being of particular interest.

I like to think of intonation as the low frequency component of pitch (discourse and phrase bound), with tone being a high frequency component (morpheme bound). Word-level stress, insofar as it is distinct from tone, might be a midrange component (lexeme bound).

It would be great to have some scholarly articles or books to reference on this subject. Any more suggestions / links?