语言学高级教程第二章

1、Suprasegmental Features,Suprasegmental Features,Suprasegmental features are those aspects of speech that involve more than single sound segments. The principal suprasegmentals are:,Syllable,Tone,Stress,Intonation,The structure of Syllable,Standard Chinese,A consonant followed by a vowel (Except nasa

2、ls/n, /) (C)V(C),How about the syllable structure of English words?,Syllable, Onset (节首) R（韵基） Nucleus （节核） Coda（节尾） k l s p,Kinds of syllable,Monosyllabic words: cat, dog, fog Polysyllabic words: table, transplant Onset Syllable Nucleus Open Syllable Rhyme Coda Closed Syllable,Onset: empty or fille

3、d with a cluster of as many as three consonants. Coda: empty or filled by as many as four consonants. English syllable can be represented as (C) C) C) V (C) C) C) C).,How much do you know about syllable?,Sy O R N C Examples: “hepl” “lupm” “rpay” “wquick” Can they be regarded as words in English? Why

4、?,Sonority Scale,Sonority Scale Sounds 5 vowels 4 approximants 3 nasals 2 fricatives 1 stops,Application and Usefulness of the Sonority Hierarchy,In a given string of phonemes, every syllable corresponds to a single sonority peak. Generally speaking, onset to nucleus is on an ascending slope and nuc

5、leus to coda is on a descending slope in terms of sonority. Exemplifications: “help”: 5 * “hepl” 5 * 4 * 4 * 3 3 2 * 2 * 1 * 1 * For the two examples above, “hepl” is not allowed in English. Usefulness: It allows us to determine not only the nucleus but it also enables us to predict the overall shap

6、e of syllable, and determine the number of syllables for a great majority of English words, leaving unexplained only a small number of cases.,“silk” vs. “sickle” (/silk/ vs. /sikl/) One-syllable word vs. two-syllable word Why?, O R N C s i l k, O R O R N N s i k ()l,Problems with the Sonority Scale,

7、According to Sonority Scale, it seems that Sickle /sikl/ does not follow the correct sequence. So to figure it out, “sickle” is regarded as a disyllabic word. Means that /kl/ forms a syllable of its own. /l/ is considered to be syllabic, while phoneme /n,m/ have a function in that way too such as in

8、 “fiction” “bottom”. Why is /s/ in the onset positions bellow acceptable? /spl-/, /spr-/, / str-/, /skw-/,Maximal Onset Principle (MOP),When there is a choice as to where to place a consonant, it is put into the onset rather than the coda. The syllable structure of “ country”/kntri/: O R O R N C N k

9、 n t r i,Stress,According to the degree of force used in producing a syllable. Primary stress: the more stressed syllable. Secondary stress: the less stressed syllable. Functions in the level of sound segmental. 1) Change the part of speech of a word. conVICT (v .) CONvict (n.) inSULT ( v.) INsult (

10、n.) 2) Change the meaning of words BLACK board means a teaching tool, while blackBIRD represents any bird that is black in color. 3) Meaning-distinctive role in the combination of ing forms and nouns. compound nouns:reading glasses : means glasses for reading. noun phrase: swimming fish : means a fi

11、sh is swimming.,Stress in the level of sentence,Function: Mainly used to express emphasis, surprise etc. At the word level, it only applies to words with at least two syllables. At the sentence level, a monosyllabic word may be said to be stressed relative to other words in the sentence. a. John bou

12、ght a red bicycle. b. John BOUGHT a red bicycle. c. John bought a RED bicycle. d. John bought a red BICYCLE.,Intonation and Tone,Intonation involves the occurrence of recurring fall-rise patterns, each of which is used with a set of relatively consistent meanings, either on single words or on groups

13、 of words of varying length. Four basic types of intonation in English: Falling tone: indicates that what said is a matter-of-fact statement. Rising tone: makes a question of what is said. Fall-rise tone: indicates that there is an implied message of what is said. Rise-fall tone The first three are the most frequently used.,Tone: Differences in pitch that can cause changes in word meaning.,Three types of Language,Tone Langauge, the meaning of a word is affected by the pitch and tones serving to differentiate lexical en