Some considerations on the tone in Chinese

关于汉语声调的一些思考

Dan Xu (1)

1 Inalco - Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales

The tone in Sinitic languages evolves at different rates. The tone system in Northern Chinese shows a simplification tendency. The tone changes in speech flow. The teaching based on a single syllable word tone cannot deal with the actual tonal change in speech. Overemphasizing single syllable word tones induces extra-work without expected success. The paper argues that Chinese tone teaching has to focus on dissyllable word tones instead of one syllable word tones, that is, the tone exercises have to take a bigger unit than a single syllable word. The tone training of dissyllable words and short sentence patterns may be more efficient in tone teaching as well as in language acquisition.

Mots clés: Tone; Acquisition; Dissyllables; Variant forms

Domaines: Linguistique

Dan Xu. Some considerations on the tone in Chinese. 南开语言学刊, 2017, 2. ⟨hal-01890765⟩