北京语言大学语言科学院

题    目：Annotating Chinese prosody: Chinese Prosodic Transcription (CHIPROT)

and the prediction of commonly weakened morphemes

时间：2024年10月15日（周二）15:00-17:00

地点：北京语言大学综合楼1223室

主讲人：Hana Třísková 教授  Czech Academy of Sciences

主持人：冯胜利 教授 北京语言大学

主办单位：语言科学院章黄学术理论研究所

内容简介：

Suprasegmental (or prosodic) features such as stress or intonation are notoriously more difficult to describe than segmental features. Annotating prosodic features of connected speech is an especially challenging task in Chinese – a tone language. The question arises whether some of these features can be predicted. If we can find underlying tendencies, regularities, or even rules, the procedure of transcribing can be faster and related to underlying linguistic structure. I have designed a prosodic transcription: CHIPROT. It was primarily developed for practical pedagogic purposes, yet it is research-based. Its final version was introduced in 2021. CHIPROT marks two prosodic features: the degree of prominence of particular syllables (4 degrees), and prosodic phrasing (prosodic phrases and prosodic words).

While evaluating the degree of prominence of syllables in connected speech, I looked for the underlying regularities. I claim that many cases can be predicted – from grammar, phonology, lexicon, information structure, or pragmatics.

(1) Some syllables represent toneless morphemes – these can be viewed as 100% predictable, they are generally always weak. (ma)

(2) Syllables realized with ordinary full tone are called normal syllables. They are viewed as a default form of tonal morphemes. (mā)

(3) Some tonal morphemes/syllables/words may become prosodically enhanced (due to emphasis, contrastive stress, emotions, etc.). (MĀ)

(4) Quite a few tonal syllables may become weakened in speech (mā). Some tonal morphemes may be weakened rather frequently, in some cases even obligatorily. On the other hand, most of them may occasionally gain prominence. I tentatively call these items commonly weakened morphemes (CWM). I propose the following major groups of CWM:

1. Monosyllabic tonal function words (such as 我, 上, 个, 是); 2. Second syllable in reduplicated monosyllabic verbs; 3. Directional complements; 4. Some resultative complements; 5. Second syllable in disyllabic words favouring the trochee pattern (做法  zuòžfǎ); 6. Second syllable in many 3­–4-syllabic words; 7. Question words used as indefinite or relative pronouns; 8. Bù 不 in potential complements; 9. Bù 不 in A-not-A questions; 10. Monosyllabic verbs followed by an object; 11. Second syllable in many non-final disyllabic words; 12. Contextually weakened full words.

Predictions of the prominence degree of particular syllables can be built into the transcription procedure as a first step, making the process faster and theoretically justified. Last but not least, predictions that particular items will be weakened or enhanced may be a great help in language pedagogy.

主讲人简介：

Hana Třísková, Ph.D. 廖敏is a research fellow at the Oriental Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences. She graduated in Sinology from Charles University, Prague. In 1982–1983 she was a postgraduate student at Peking University. Her research interests include phonology and phonetics of Chinese, especially utterance-level prosody, and the methodology of teaching Chinese pronunciation. Her goal is to introduce results of research in Chinese linguistics and phonetics into L2 teaching. She teaches courses in Chinese prosody at Charles University.