Week 11 prominence, intonation and more practice

Last few weeks, I mainly focused on the segmental features of Suzhou dialect, and this week most attention was paid on prominence and intonations.

As I repeatedly mentioned before, Chinese is a tonal language, which means differences in pitch on the same syllabic unit can signify differences of meaning. In mandarin Chinese, thus, the intonation units are separated by thought groups like they are in English; however, we tend not to use prominence to highlight or place focus on an element because Chinese has "very flexible word order which means the highlighting of information may be achieved by moving various sentence elements to the beginning or end of an utterance" (Celce-Murcia, 2010, p.226). For example:

我下周去俄亥俄出差

 wo xia zhou qu e hai e chu chai.

I will go on a business trip to Ohio next week.

If we wish to emphasize the time of the business trip, we will put the time phrase at the start of the sentence:

下周我去俄亥俄出差

 xia zhou wo qu e hai e chu chai.

NEXT WEEK, I will go on a business trip to Ohio.

However, when I tried to apply these rules to Suzhou dialect, it seems that Suzhou dialect does not follow the pattern. I'm really confused about how Suzhou dialect places its prominence because according to my archetype, the stress is not regularly placed on the sense groups or in order to achieve grammatically coherent structure. For instance, for interrogative sentences, interestingly, some of them are in rising tones and the others are in falling tones, making it even more difficult to distinguish.

I talked to one of my friends who are a born-and-raise Suzhou citizen, trying to figure out the intonation pattern. According to her experience, "I cannot conclude many rules or patterns, all I can say is that Suzhou dialect tends to be in a very high pitch when stressing something and it has a very elegant rhythm like music."

Of course, such description does not help a lot, but she did suggest that I should try to listen to some folk songs (usually without music) and explore the patterns there.

I took her advice and try to imitate the intonation pattern in this folk gimmick and it turned out to be a little bit easier because syllables with pitch 5 occurs in regular intervals.

Here is my practice of the gimmick: