Chinese EFL Learners’ acquisition of English Word Stress: A Case Study of College Non- English Majors and High School Students文献综述

 2022-08-19 09:46:09

Chinese EFL Learnersrsquo; Acquisition of English Word Stress: A Case Study of College Non-English Majors and High School Students

一、文献综述 (Literature Review)

  1. The nature of stress

As an important suprasegmental feature, studies concerning stress started quite early in the linguistic field. Many researchers have studied the nature of stress and conclude the acoustic factors that determine stress.

Roach (2017) suggests that stress can be studied from two perspectives: production and perception. From the perspective of production, stressed syllable requires the speaker to use more muscular energy while from the perspective of perception, stressed syllables sounds more prominent to the hearer. Ladefoged (2014) who also studies stress from the aspect of production， states that when stressed syllables are produced, the speaker strives to push more air out of his or her lungs.

There are other phoneticians who study word stress from metrical perspective. Hayes (1995) argues in his research that English word stress constitutes linguistic rhythm, in which stress patterns in English, are organized in hierarchical construction. Also Duanmu (2016) holds the view that stress is a syllablersquo;s possibility of being taped in a rhythm and the stress of a syllable gets stronger as its possibility of being taped in a rhythm gets higher.

Roach (2017) mentions four factors that are important in determining stress: loudness, length, pitch and quality. Syllables that are made louder, longer, with higher pitch and different quality are more likely to be taken as stressed. But previous experiments also have revealed that these four factors are not equally important (Fry 1955;,1958). Fry (1958) points out that pitch often is considered to have the strongest effect, and length is also important while quality and loudness are less effective.

  1. Classification of stress

Stress can be divided into lexical stress and sentence stress. While lexical stress is the stress assigned to a given syllable in a word, sentence stress (also known as prosodic stress) refers to the stress applied to higher level prosodic unit rather than individual words and it is often associated with information focus (Beckman et al. 1986). In this thesis, only lexical stress is focused on; thus the following part will be merely about the lexical stress. Lexical stress can have different levels and can be fixed or variable in different languages.

2.1 Levels of stress

In the two-level analysis of stress, syllables are classified into stressed and unstressed, but it is often argued that there are actually intermediate levels of stress. In Chomsky and Hallersquo;s The Sound Pattern of English, which is published in 1968, the stress in English is described as having four levels: primary, secondary, tertiary and quaternary. The primary stress is the strongest type of stress and it is often caused by pitch movement or tone. For example, in the word “around”, the second syllable occupies the primary stress. Meanwhile secondary stress is said to be stressed relatively not as strong as primary stress but is stronger than unstressed syllables. For example, in the word “photographic”, the first syllable occupies the secondary stress. And in some polysyllabic words tertiary and quaternary stress are also possible. But other phoneticians such as Ladeforged (2014) have noted that it is possible to describe English with only one degree of stress, as long as unstressed syllables are phonemically distinguished for vowel reduction. They believe that the multiple levels posited for English, whether primary–secondary or primary–secondary–tertiary, are mere phonetic details and not true phonemic stress, and often, the alleged secondary stress is not characterized by the increase in respiratory activity normally associated with primary stress in English or with all stress in other languages. Roach (2017) also notes that the introduction of tertiary stress seems to introduce an unnecessary degree of complexity. So in this thesis, only the primary stress will be the focus.

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