The Comparison Between English Stress And Chinese Stress

Stress is an important feature of the phonology and it is a significant clue in understanding the syntactic structure, semantic structure and pragmatic structure of a language. It is also a helpful means to express the grammatical meanings. In this thesis, the study of the stress in English and Chinese will be made from three aspects. Firstly, the present analysis explains the phonetic realization of stress in English and Chinese in that stress is an important phonetic phenomenon cross-linguistically. Secondly, the present analysis examines the grammatical functions of stress in English and Chinese. A detailed description in the introduction of the stress in English and Chinese is followed by a systematic explanation of the phonological rules, grammatical functions and semantic meanings of the stress in English and Chinese. Thirdly, the present analysis focuses on the comparison of stress between English and Chinese, exploring the similarities and differences in stress between the two languages. With these three aspects, the present study in the thesis is largely based on the analysis of relevant literature and is made in light of contemporary phonological theories of stress and by means of a combination of description and explanation.This thesis consists of five chapters. In the first chapter, attention is paid to the discussion of the related studies of stress at home and abroad. The second chapter dwells on the discussion of English stress. In this chapter, the acoustic features of English stress, the characteristics of English stress, the rules of word stress, the rules of stress of English compound-words and grammatical functions of English stress are discussed in detail. Besides the above discussion, the types of sentence stress in English, the rules of sentence stress distribution, the relation between English stress and syntactic structure, as well as the relation between English stress and rhythm, are also included in the discussion. In the third chapter, the Chinese stress is delved into, and in this chapter the acoustic features of Chinese stress, neutral tone in Chinese, the rules of word stress of Chinese and the semantic functions of neutral tone in the lexicalization are brought into discussion. Moreover, the phonological rules of sentence stress of Chinese and the relation between stress and syntactic structure are further studied in the third chapter. The fourth chapter discusses the comparison between English stress and Chinese stress in details, including the acoustic features between English and Chinese stress, the functions of word stress between English and Chinese, sentence stress between English and Chinese, sentence stress rules between English and Chinese as well as the grammatical functions of sentence stress between English and Chinese. The fifth chapter draws a conclusion based on the analyses made in the previous chapters.