| Light and strong tone is a very important characteristic in modern Chinese phonetic system. It is a clue to the understanding of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic structures and it is also one of the means for expression of grammatical meaning. In Chinese teaching the quality of reading and writing teaching can be improved based on the results from the study on light and strong tone in modern Chinese. In the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language, the study results can help foreign learners'speak Chinese in the more sterling way. In Chinese information processing, the results, from the angle of linguistics, will be helpful to speech synthesis, speech recognition and understanding. The present study mainly discuss light and strong tone from different perspectives, hoping to give a reasonable explanation to some language phenomenon about lexical and grammatical level, and accordingly provide some new ideas for the studies of linguistic theories and teaching Chinese as a foreign language. The present paper is made up of four chapters.Chapter One defines stress and light tone, which is disputed in the academic community. This chapter also involves some macro descriptions and analyses of the studies on modern Chinese light and strong tone. The present paper holds the view that people should understand stress from two aspects: expression function and form. And light tone should also be put into two groups: one is in words and phrases, which is similar to"phoneme"; the other is a kind of special way of expression to emphasize stress.Chapter Two mainly discusses some issues about the characteristic, synonym, grammatical relations and standardization of light tone. Two viewpoints about the characteristics of light tone are discussed here. Light tone has the similar function to phoneme but it is not qualified for absolute phoneme. With a view to the characteristics above and the fact that light tone has the function of tone, the light tone should take a place in mandarin phoneme system. What is more, the light tone is also an important language form to expressing meanings. It can be in words and phrases, which corresponds to"phoneme". And it can also be a special form of expression to emphasize stress. The light tone has the function to distinguish meanings and meanwhile it is a means of constructing words and sentences. The adhesion feature of structure light tone is, to some extent, helpful in analyzing some sentence structures. For a long time, the cognizance and use of the light tone are in a state of confusion. So it is necessary to regulate them and make sure of the principles and measures.Chapter Three discusses the relations between grammatical stress and structural focus, the position of grammatical stress and some other issues. Grammatical stress can visualize structural focus. It decides the position of grammatical stress to combine the trend of focus choice with sentence structures. On the basis of the theoretical foundation of"stress appearing at the end of a sentence", the internal rules of"stress range"are affirmed further: fundamental rules and outspread rules.….Chapter Four discusses the relations between emphatic stress and focus. For a special purpose, the speaker can change the original focus position of a sentence by emphasizing stress or other ways, making it become a marked information focus. Emphatic stress can be classified into two kinds: contrastive form and emphatic form. Contrastive form of emphatic stress usually visualizes contrastive focus and emphatic form of stress is often used to visualize emphatic focus. Emphatic stress is a means of focus, which has the function to give cues of information focus. The enactment of stress is not arbitrary but is restricted by the preset enactment. The preset enactment decides the discourse intention and the kind of emphatic stress. |
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