There are obvious prosodic differences between formal and informal registers in Mandarin Chinese.Based on the theory of Stylistic-register Grammar that different regis-ters have different sound systems,it is argued that the fundamental prosodic units and prin-ciples of formal register have become crucial issues to be elaborated and characterized.With relatively homogeneous materials of formal register,this paper proposes that the smallest in-dependent unit of a formal sentence is compound-feet determined by the Principle of Balance of Two-Feet Formation.The internal structure and direction of compound-feet exert impor-tant prosodic constraints on words combination through the size of units,number of bran-ches,balance requirements,and pause distributions.Furthermore,it is discovered that for-mal prosody has different requirements on different lexical categories and syntactic positions.Meanwhile,the first compound-feet based on the syntactic structure plays a crucial role in determining formal register by prosody.
formal registerthe Principle of Balance of Two-Feet Formationcom-pound-feetprosodic templatessyntactic distributions
维普
万方数据
