The Present Stage of the Researches about Chinese Intonation(<Feature Articles>Current Trends in Intonational Research on Chinese, Korean, Mongolian, German and French)

Abstract

The last quarter of the 20^th century saw epoc-making changes for both of phonological and phonetic researches of Chinese language. Since the ancient time, numerous descriptive researches had certainly been done according to the traditional method, when the new wave which arrived from the western world in the 20^th century made them obsolete all of a sudden. In this paper I introduce two subjects which have aroused discussion in the new trends, that is, firstly how the internal rhythm of Chinese synchronizes with the system of stress accents, and secondly how the Chinese tone leads to the pitch contour.