What is it about?
This is a rejoinder to F. Dell's review of the analysis of stress proposed in Duanmu (2000), see pp. 33-63 in this issue. In his book, Duanmu proposes that Standard Chinese has left-headed feet. In addition, in compounds and phrases, stress is assigned to the syntactic non-head. F. Dell raises a number of questions for Duanmu’s analysis. In the present article, Duanmu explains how the questions can be addressed. He also offers some new evidence and argues that the analysis with left-headed feet remains the simplest theory.
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Why is it important?
This is a notoriously difficult question in Chinese, because native judgment on stress is difficult to obtain in Chinese (and in tone languages in general). A number of theoretical questions are involved: Can a language have both tone and stress? Can Chinese have stressless feet? Is the foot iambic or trochaic in Standard Chinese? Do Chinese dialects have different feet (e.g. some iambic, some trochaic, and some stressless)?
Perspectives
The proposal in this paper is that Standard Chinese uses a binary foot that is trochaic (left-headed stress). The broader claim is that all Chinese dialects use the same foot type, which is also the most common in other languages. A more recent work on this topic is Duanmu (2016), Foot and Stress (端木三 2016, 《音步和重音》), available from the author's website: [www.umich.edu/~duanmu]
San Duanmu
University of Michigan
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Left-headed feet and phrasal stress in Chinese, Cahiers de linguistique - Asie orientale, December 2004, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/19606028_033_01-04.
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