韵律研究最新发展以及与其他领域关系.PDF

Advances in prosody research and how they are related to other areas Yi Xu, Fang Liu University College London [] Abstract Prosody research has seen vast progress in the past 30 years, especially in the recent decade or so. It has evolved from a marginal area to a major discipline in phonetics. In this process, the study of prosody in tone languages, particularly in Mandarin Chinese, has made critical contributions. The major findings indicate that, to understand prosody, it is necessary to explicate how prosodic forms encode communicative functions, and that the understanding of the encoding mechanisms requires clear knowledge about the relation between surface prosodic forms and underlying articulatory mechanisms. It has been further found that prosody is ubiquitous in speech, and that the core mechanisms of prosody are no different from those of segments. Therefore, the understanding of prosody is instrumental in solving a number of key co