重读赵元任先生的普通话重音观

Re-examination of Yuen Ren Chao's arguments on stress in Mandarin Chinese

本文基于赵元任先生的重音观,考察了汉语词概念和词重音的不确定性,并对某些误读概念进行了补遗澄清。讨论要点包括:正常重音是“重重”式的变体,显示出音位重音的相对动态性以及可预测性;对比重音和弱重音是正常重音的变体,表现出话语重音的不稳定性以及不可预测性。声调音节之间没有区别性的重音差别(Chao,1968a),“中重”式和“重中”式的判断往往通过话语层而不是词层,无法满足词重音认定的自洽结构和音系标准。话语重音常与声调产生互动,并且受到语法、语义或语用功能的影响或控制。文章建议摆脱汉语词重音的纷争,将词层突显辩证地融入话语重音的研究框架中,以深化对现代汉语韵律特征的认识。

This paper re-examines the arguments on stress made by Yuen Ren Chao and clarifies some misunderstandings on related issues.Firstly,normal stress is a variant of spondee,presenting the relative dynamics and predictability among phonemic stresses;Contrastive stress and weak stress,on the other hand,behave as the variants of normal stress,manifesting the instability and unpredictability of utterance accent.Secondly,since there is no distinctive features on stress between tonal syllables(Chao,1968a),iambus and trochee are usually judged on the utterance level rather than the word level.This has caused failure in satisfying the phonological standards on word stress identification.Thirdly,utterance accent often interacts with tones and gets affected by semantics,grammar or pragmatic functions.Therefore,the paper proposes to get rid of the disputes on word stress by integrating word prominence into the study of utterance accent so as to deepen our understanding of the prosodic features of Mandarin Chinese.