再谈对外汉语声调和语调教学

A Further Discussion of the Instruction in Tones and Intonations in Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language

本文再次探讨以下三个问题:第一,母语为英语(及其他非声调语言)的学习者表述汉语疑问和陈述语气时,如何做到在边界音节的音高上升或下降的同时,还能保持其调型不变,不会出现"洋腔洋调"?汉语音节重读了,其调型也不变,如何实现?第二,为什么说学习者要学好汉语语调必须先掌握好声调?为什么"只有学好了语调,声调的学习效果才可得以巩固"?"非声调语言学习者要运用自己语言的语调知识于汉语声调学习上的策略"的根据是什么?第三,我们认为,母语为英语的学习者学习汉语语调时,既要看到英汉重读凸显之间和边界调之间的共性,还要积极运用其差异,使他/她说出来的汉语不仅是地道的(没有洋腔洋调),而且有语气,有轻重,给人以轻重缓急、抑扬顿挫的感觉。我们以为,开展北京话语调与有代表性的方言和民族语言的语调之间的共性和差异研究,以及汉语语调与其他有代表性的非英语重音语言及音高语言的语调之间的共性和差异研究,不仅有助于对外汉语语调教学,还能从中找到语调的内在共性,以丰富语调理论。

This paper further explores issues pertaining to tone and intonation in teaching Chinese as a foreign language and discusses ways in which pedagogical intervention can be effective in relating phonetic shapes of lexical tones in Mandarin Chinese to the overall pitch movements in different intonation patterns,and drawing upon comparisons of intonation in English and Chinese.Tone occupies a central place in teaching Chinese from the onset of language acquisition,and the focus has been on differentiating four lexical tones based on their pitch patterns in citation form and application of the tone sandhi rule in the context of two adjacent third tones.While learners of Chinese—speakers of American English in particular—have been able to distinguish and pronounce tones in isolation with varying degrees of success,practitioners in language teaching have found that the relative success of tone acquisition at the syllable and word levels is vastly compromised or even obliterated in larger linguistic units when sentence-level prosody comes into play.There is a strong consensus among researchers that foreign accent in the acquisition of Chinese is attributable to tone errors.Given that every syllable in an utterance has a tone,except the ones said in neutral tone,correcting every misspoken tone is not only a mission impossible in practice,but also a frustrating and demoralizing experience on the part of language learners.More often than not,learners simply opted to ignore tones and utter the sentence in an intonation they are most familiar with,as Y.R.Chao(1933)aptly pointed out in his seminal study of tone and intonation in Chinese.In this paper,we re-examine tone and intonation in the context of foreign language teaching by taking advantage of recent developments in linguistic studies,noting that a rich body of research,both descriptive and experimental,has emerged to enhance our understanding of the linguistic functions and physical properties of tone and intonation in Chinese and their interaction with other aspects of the prosodic system.Lin(2012)offers a detailed account of carefully designed study on the acoustics of word-and sentence-level prosodic phenomena and lays out a model of intonation—with an explicit endorsement of the autosegmental-metrical approach to intonation(Ladd,2008)—in which intonation boundary tones and sentence-level metrical prominence connected with broad or narrow focus are invoked to define the basic intonation structures in Chinese.Discussions in this paper are couched in Lin’s framework of intonation and proceeded as follows.As a point of departure,we raise the question of how language learners,especially speakers of non-tonal languages such as English,handle tones in different prosodic positions—where sentence-level nuclear stress falls and at the end of an intonation phrase—and communicative functions—declarative or interrogative.In doing so,we focus on how tones are actually realized at the sentence level.The discussion on the interaction of tone and intonation centers around how pitch patterns of tones at the boundary or in nuclear stress position respond to adjustment due to sentence-level prosody.For example,the rising tone(second tone)at the end of a yes-no question without the question particle"ma"sees the whole rising pitch contour elevated with the high f0 ending tilting even higher.In Lin’s model,the interrogative boundary tone causes the adjustment of pitch patterns,but it does not change tonal identification.Similarly,the falling tone(fourth tone)in the same condition becomes a more subdued fall,with the low f0 ending elevated more than the high f0 beginning.A different pitch adjustment pattern is observed in the nuclear stress position,which generally involves expansion of pitch range by either raising the f0 peak or lowering the f0 valley in the contour.Pedagogically,it makes sense to focus on tones(and their realizations)in significant prosodic positions,rather than making a futile effort to correct every tone error whenever it occurs.A comparison of intonation in English and Chinese reveals both similarities and differences,especially in terms of how significant pitch events such as pitch accents in English and tones in Chinese are realized in larger linguistic units.Such an understanding can play a facilitating role in helping learners develop a model of tones in their interlanguage at the early stage of language acquisition so that they can continue to finetune the model as their linguistic experience becomes more sophisticated.The paper calls for more efforts in comparative studies of intonation in typologically different languages in pursuit of universals in intonation,and in development of better understandings of different intonation systems for instructional purposes as well.