The "Music" Of Language

Due primarily to improper rhythm and ignorance of other suprasegmental features, Chinese learners tend to have a native accent when speaking English. Rhythm is an universal phenomenon, which we observe in nature, and in the pronunciation of various languages. Though realized in various ways, rhythm reflects the melodious beauty of language.Phonology has a long history. However, either the structuralist phonology or the early period of generative phonology has overlooked the importance of suprasegmental features and failed to demonstrate them appropriately. With the development of nonlinear phonology originated in the middle of the 1970s, more and more linguists and scholars have attached attention on suprasegmental phonology. Nevertheless, the study of suprasegmentals is far from satisfaction compared with the study of segmentals, for the latter have been the focus of phonological research over the past decades of years.As far as rhythm is concerned, scholars at home and abroad have already made constructive and rewarding achievements, which provide us with meaningful theoretical references in furthering the issue. However, the majority of these investigations have almost separated rhythm from other suprasegmental features. Rhythm as the starting point, the present author approached the issue of"Chinglish"by drawing on previous achievements, analyzed the characteristics of rhythm in both English and Chinese from the perspective of beauty, and concluded the universality and individuality between the two languages.The study has both theoretical value and practical value. Theoretically, it will help us to understand better the phonology of English and Chinese, appreciate the suprasegmental features and the essential characteristics of rhythm. From the practical point of view, a systematic study of rhythm and other suprasegmentals is of much significance not only to language teaching and learning, but also to such fields as intercultural communication and translation.The thesis has mainly adopted a qualitative approach, including literature review, contrastive analysis, case study, etc. The body of the thesis consists of six chapters:Chapter One is a brief introduction, including the motivation of the study, research questions, the significance of the study and the organization of the thesis. Chapter Two is literature review. It is concerned with the development of phonology, the past and present of rhythm and suprasegmental study, aiming to find out a new research perspective for the present study. Chapter Three and Chapter Four analyze rhythm and some related suprasegmental features in English and Chinese respectively. With similar structure, the author expounded how rhythm and other suprasegmentls cooperate with each other to reflect the "music"of language. Chapter Five compares the universality and individuality between English and Chinese rhythm. Chapter Six draws a conclusion of the thesis, in which the application and limitation of the study are also involved.English is a typical intonation language, while Chinese is a typical tone language; the former has a stress-timed rhythm, whereas the latter has a syllable-timed one. In English, rhythm is created mainly by the recurrence of stressed and unstressed syllables at more or less regular intervals of time and the alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables. In Chinese, each syllable represents a Chinese character, and comparatively stress is not as important as that in English. In addition to stress, rhythm cooperates with other suprasegmental features such as length, pause and intonation in both English and Chinese. Sound variations are common in connected speech in both languages. They are closely interrelated with rhythm, contributing to and influenced by rhythm. All these elements work together, constituting the"music"of language.