Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics

1. Introduction In this article “Chinese” refers generally to all varieties and dialects. The boundaries of the syllable are fairly clear in Chinese. In most cases, each Chinese written graph, zì 字, represents a syllable and thus syllable boundaries are unambiguous in writing. In most cases, each morpheme also corresponds to a spoken syllable, which may help speakers judge syllable boundaries whether they are literate or not. Chinese scholars have studied syllables for a long time. For example, Sūn Yán 孫炎 of the Three Kingdoms period (about 200–280) used a method, known as fǎnqi è 反切 ‘re…

The study of the interface between syntax and phonology is a new area in modern linguistics. The term phonology in this interdisciplinary study specifically refers to prosody; it is therefore sometimes called prosodic syntax, i.e., the study of how syntax is constrained by prosody. Prosody mainly concerns suprasegmental phenomena such as mora/syllable weight or length, stress, intonation, rhythm, etc. in natural speech (Liberman 1975). Although prosody can affect the meaning of an utterance (with different stress on different elements in …

Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), formulated most noticeably by M.A.K. Halliday (1976, Halliday and Matthiessen 2004/2008), views language as a system of choice of meaning, that means “[a] language is a resource for making meaning, and meaning resides in systemic patterns of choice” (Halliday and Matthiessen 2008:23). Three kinds of metafunctions, that is, meanings in three modes, are defined in SFL: ideational, interpersonal, and textual. The ideational metafunction construes human experie…