Stress, emphasis, pause, and meaning in Mandarin

Language Log 2017-11-08

In "Mandarin Janus sentences" (11/4/17), there arose the question of whether duōshǎo 多少 ("how many") and duō shǎo 多少 ("how few") are spoken differently. I'm very glad that, in the comments, Chris Button recognizes that Sinitic languages can have stress. (The same is doubtless true of other tonal languages).

This is an aspect of Mandarin and the other Sinitic languages that most scholars completely ignore and even disavow. I've written about it from time to time on Language Log, e.g.:

"When intonation overrides tone" (6/4/13)

"When intonation overrides tone, part 2" (5/11/17)

"Tones and the brain" (3/3/15)

"Dissimilation, stress, sandhi, and other tonal variations in Mandarin" (8/26/14)

"slip(per)" (7/22/14)

"Mandarin by the numbers" (6/8/13)

"Where did Chinese tones come from and where are they going?" (6/25/13)

"Pinyin memoirs" (8/13/16)

In the next to the last post, I note that University of Oslo student Øystein Krogh Visted has recently (2012) written a very interesting M.A thesis entitled "Nuances of Pronunciation in Chinese: Lexical Stress in Beijing Mandarin." Here's a brief description of the thesis:

The pronunciation of Beijing Mandarin, which is the basis for Modern Standard Mandarin, is in reality not as straightforward as it is usually presented. General books on the language and common textbooks in English on the subject usually only give very basic, prescriptive (though supposedly descriptive) analyses of the basic features of pronunciation. Finer points are generally not discussed in any detail. The treatment of amongst other things the aspect of word stress (the parts of words that are emphasized in speech) in mastering and indeed properly understanding Chinese is thus neglected. It has not yet acquired the position in Chinese language-teaching it arguably needs, so that the language may begin to be taught and indeed learned in a more comprehensive manner. This book will take a basic analytical approach to the phenomenon of word stress in Beijing Mandarin. It compares and discusses available meta-information on the topic, as well as its theoretical underpinnings and practical applications, and from a pedagogical starting point aims to bring attention to these important nuances in the Chinese language.

See especially this comment to the last post:

Reading pinyin text for me is as easy as reading English, and I can skim-read it the way I do English. I prefer the texts not to have tone marks, because I have to make an effort to block them out, just as I would have to make an effort to block out accent and stress marks if they were included in normal English text. In this sense, what Wang Yujiang mentioned in several of his comments is true (see especially his excellent response to Cory Lubliner): when Chinese speak or read out a text, they do not enunciate the tones one by one as they are marked in a dictionary. Rather, they develop a rhythm in their reading / speech / singing (for that matter) in which emphasis, stress, and overall "feel" of a sentence / utterance become dominant, rather than the canonical dictionary entry tonal categories of individual characters. This is a phenomenon that a few Czech phoneticians have observed, and Christoph Harbsmeier (the German-Norwegian-Danish Sinologist) has paid particular attention to. The problem is that it's virtually impossible to predict how this will turn out ahead of time for discrete characters. The flow of a sentence or utterance only happens in real time and under the emotions of the moment. Of course, if one is anal about it, one could devise means for notating such spoken sentences once they were uttered, but I don't know how useful that information would be for pedagogical purposes, and to what purpose one would put it other than for phonological research.

Without mentioning names, I know non-native speakers who have astonishingly good mastery of tones for thousands of characters, some of them who even wag their fingers or bob their heads in the air when they pronounce the tones as they are speaking or reading Chinese (it's very painful to watch). The best speakers of Chinese that I know (and here again I'm not mentioning names, though it would be very easy to list a dozen or so of the best), almost uniformly, are not tied to the individual characters / syllables, but rather have developed the ability to grasp the overall sound pattern of whole sentences. It is very impressive (and satisfying) to listen to them do this, and some of them develop this ability very quickly, already within the first year of their study of Mandarin or Cantonese or Taiwanese, or whichever Sinitic language they are studying. In no case are such masters of spoken Chinese languages fixated on the characters.

Nor, I would add, are they fixated on the tones. Real speakers of Mandarin (and other Sinitic languages) are not robots. They do not utter sentences and paragraphs as though they were matching the canonical, citation tones listed for characters in dictionaries mechanically one after another to the syllables of their speech. Rather, human speech has a rhythm and a flow through which it imparts meaning and emotion.

Phoneticians, psycholinguists, and other specialists have studied the phenomenon of pitch at the lexical level and at the sentence level, but the results of their research are not well known (or known at all) to Sinologists and Chinese language teachers.

A couple of citations:

"Jie Liang and Vincent J. van Heuven, "Chinese tone and intonation perceived by L1 and L2 listeners", in Tomas Riad and Carlos Gussenhoven, ed., Tones and Tunes: Experimental studies in word and sentence prosody, pp. 27-62.

Shu-hui Peng, Marjorie K. M. Chan, Chiu-yu Tseng, Tsan Huang, Ok Joo Lee, and Mary E. Beckman, "Towards a Pan-Mandarin System for Prosodic Transcription", in Sun-Ah Jun, ed., Prosodic Typology: The Phonology of Intonation and Phrasing, Vol. 1, pp. 230-270. (The authors use ToBI (tones and break indices) conventions for transcribing and annotating the prosody of speech. See:

In the preceding two paragraph quotation, I mentioned Czech scholars who have paid attention to these aspects of Mandarin speech. Chief among them is the phonologist Oldřich Švarný who recorded huge quantities of the beautiful Pekingese speech of Tang Yunling and analyzed it in terms of stress patterns. Christoph Harbsmeier, whom I also mentioned above, has arranged for the digitization of this enormous corpus, which makes these invaluable recordings available for further and more sophisticated studies (now that more advanced hardware and software have been developed).

Even more wonderful, Harbsmeier has loaded all of the digitized spoken material from Švarný-Tang into a beta web-site called MILK (Mandarin Audio Idiolect Dictionary). This makes the material easily accessible to all who are interested in pursuing research on conversationally spoken, not read, Mandarin. For each line of the transcript, you can open a window that displays the following: waveform & spectrogram, formants, pitch, and selection stats. Harbsmeier has informed me that he and his team have also applied Praat-style analysis to the recordings so that we can see where the stress is. Through all of these devices, the phonetic features of Tang laoshi's speech are made visible.

Now, I invite you to the treat of listening to the 2,200 occurrences of 多少 in the Švarný-Tang corpus as it is recorded in Harbsmeier's MILK. I think you will be astonished at the wide variation for just this one lexeme as it is realized in the living speech of a reliable native informant. Enjoy!