Typological Features of Prosody in Tibeto-Burman Languages:A Comparative Perspective of Prosody in Chinese
Prosody is a common feature of Chinese and Tibetan Languages in China,and also a distinctive language phenomenon.Based on the linguistic typological theory and the corpus of more than 50 Tibeto-Burman languages,this paper describes and analyzes the basic characteristics of the Tibeto-Burman language prosody.It points out that there are eight types of prosody in Tibetan-Burman languages,including double syllables,double-toned rhyming,vowel harmo-ny,consonant harmony,ending-rhyme harmony,tone harmony,syllable strength from weak to strong,and reduplica-tion.The formation and development of prosody are constrained by linguistic typological properties,the principle of lin-guistic economy,and people's aesthetic consciousness.In addition,prosody has a significant impact on the phonetics,morphology,syntax,and semantics of Tibeto-Burman languages.This paper also points out that Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages are related,both belong to analytical languages,and both have rich prosody features.We can further understand the characteristics of Chinese prosody through Tibeto-Burman's reflection on Chinese.By compari-son,it is found that Chinese focuses on syntactic prosody,while Tibeto-Burman languages focus on morphological pros-ody;Chinese prosody emphasizes tone,while Tibeto-Burman prosody does not;The prosody differences among differ-ent dialects of Chinese are small,while those among different languages of Tibeto-Burman are large.In general,proso-dy has a stronger constraint on Chinese.It is believed that the study of Chinese must take related languages as references to deepen the understanding of Chinese and to find the historical evolution of Chinese.
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