Oxford University Press The Phonology of Standard Chinese (The Phonology of the World's Languages)

Chinese phonology has been studied for over 1700 years. Before the twentieth century the focus of such scholarship was on the rhyming categories of syllables for the purposes of composing proper literary works and of preserving what was felt to be proper Chinese. During the first half of this century phonological research was directed towards the production of a simplified, national, 'standard' Chinese sound system. The academic study of Chinese linguistics, including phonology, dates from the 1960s. This has produced substantial literature, mainly in Chinese. This is a comprehensive study of Chinese phonology. It covers several areas that are either not dealt with in previous books or only superficially touched upon, such as the large amount of missing syllable patterns (Chapter 3), stress (Chapter 6), the word length problem ( Chapter 7), and the word order problem (Chapter 8). It also offers new analyses of several traditional topics, such as the phonemic inventory (Chapter 2), allophonic variation (Chapter 3), syllable structure (Chapter 4), the [r] suffix (Chapter 9), tone (Chapter 10), and Tone 3 Sandhi (Chapter 11). The book pays attention to both factual description and theoretical analyses. In addition, efforts have been made to avoid unnecessary jargon and to introduce relevant theories in a non-technical way, so that the contents are accessible to a broader audience.