Light-medium-heavy syllable stress patterns and other pronunciation subtleties

[Demonic_Duck 1,277]

Splitting this off from here: https://www.chinese-forums.com/forums/topic/59991-hsk-30-new-new-hsk/?do=findComment&comment=470626  

 

16 hours ago, 艾墨本 said:

[Information about light-medium-heavy syllable stress] is well established and used in textbooks that revolve around 播音员 and 普通话水平测试.

These are textbooks for native speakers trying to make their accents more standard, right?

 

Also, how does this fit in with neutral tones theory-wise? Do non-neutral syllables with light stress still retain some semblance of tone, or is choosing not to transcribe some light syllables with neutral tone really just an orthographic convention when writing pinyin?

 

16 hours ago, 艾墨本 said:

Kind of like how you rarely see neutral tones separated into several categories depending on the preceding tone or the avoidance of explaining the complexity of multiple third tones in a row and simplifying it to just turning the first of the two into second tone.

Can you recommend any good resources that go into this kind of thing comprehensively?

[ChTTay 1,013]

Glad to see you’re posting regularly @Demonic_Duck

 

The Beijing Chinese forums (what year?) meet-up alumni. 
 

That’s all. 🤣

[Demonic_Duck 1,277]

Welp, this thread was a failure (good to see you too though @ChTTay!)

 

@艾墨本 I noticed you liked the post in the original thread but coyly didn't reply to this one — is this a case of wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen? 😉

[Michaelyus 269]

I'm going to leave a short reference to Chao Yuen-Ren's 1968 work A Grammar of Spoken Chinese, where on p.37 he states how there is no need to call for a phonemic medium stress.

 

It is instructive to look at what reasoning he gives, and to look at how he analyses what gives rise to this intermediate level of "stress".