Miao and temple: Week 9 stress and tone sandhi in Suzhou dialect...

English is known to be a stress-timed language which means syllables are grouped into metric foot which contains strongly stressed syllables, lightly stressed syllables and unstressed syllables, causing it to have a regular rhythmic beat while Chinese, to the contrary, is a syllable-timed language with tonal changes as its major characteristics. It means that Chinese has fairly regular stress on each syllable. Thus, when Chinese learners speak English they, as Celce-Murcia said, "tend to stress syllables in English more equally, without giving sufficient stress to the main words and without sufficiently reducing unstressed syllables.

Also, Chinese language does not have much variations in assimilation, linking, or other connected speech features because we have very clear word boundaries. The situation also applies to Suzhou dialect.

However, as I mentioned last week,we use different pitches and tones to make stress and distinguish different words. For instance, in English lexical stress will result in part-of-speech alternations between nouns and verbs while in Chinese different tones with the same consonants and vowels combinations signals different meanings. For example, "yi sheng" with both words on first tone means "medical doctor" and if the second word changes into fourth tone the meaning changes accordingly to "the whole life".

We have 4 tones in Mandarin Chinese and 7 tones in Suzhou dialect.

In certain cases, the tones of syllables will change when they are combined into words or phrases. These tone changes are called "tone sandhi". These changes are not written out in Pinyin, but they are used when we say words and phrases. Here are the sandhi rules in mandarin Chinese:

3 + 3 => 2 + 3 你好(hello) ni3hao3 => ni2hao3

3 + 1 or 2 or 4 => 3* + 1 or 2 or 4, where 3* means a third tone without the final rise

你听（you listen!）ni3ting1 => ni3*ting1

yi1 + 1 or 2 or 3 => yi4 + 1 or 2 or 3 一天(one day) yi1tian1 =>> yi4tian1

yi1 + 4 => yi2 + 4 一面(one aspect) yi1mian4 => yi2mian4

bu4 + 4 => bu2 +4 不是 (no!) bu4shi4 => bu2shi4

Tone sandhi also appears in Suzhou dialect.