Overview

Chinese phonology has been studied for over 1700 years. Before the twentieth century the focus of such scholarship was on the rhyming categories of syllables for the purposes of composing proper literary works and of preserving what was felt to be proper Chinese. During the first half of this century phonological research was directed towards the production of a simplified, national, 'standard' Chinese sound system. The academic study of Chinese linguistics, including phonology, dates from the 1960s. This has produced substantial literature, mainly in Chinese. This is a comprehensive account of and introduction to Chinese phonology. It covers several areas that are either not dealt with in previous books or only superficially touched upon, such as the large amount of missing syllable patterns (Chapter 3), stress (Chapter 6), the word length problem ( Chapter 7), and the word order problem (Chapter 8). It also offers new analyses of several traditional topics, such as the phonemic inventory (Chapter 2), allophonic variation (Chapter 3), syllable structure (Chapter 4), the [r] suffix (Chapter 9), tone (Chapter 10), and Tone 3 Sandhi (Chapter 11). The book pays attention to both factual description and theoretical analyses, and works well as a textbook for students. Efforts have been made to avoid unnecessary jargon and to introduce relevant theories in a non-technical way, so that the contents are accessible to a broader audience.

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9780199258314

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Reviews

An ambitious work, with good descriptive coverage, a selective summary of previous analyses, and sketches of lots of interesting new proposals. Seems likely to become a useful reference for non-Sinologists.

Author Information

San Duanmu is Associate Professor of Linguistics, University of Michigan. He obtained his Ph.D. in Linguistics from MIT in 1990 and has held a teaching post at Fudan University, Shanghai (1981-86).

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