자오의 “중국어 성조와 억양(Tone and Intonation in Chinese)” 재고찰 = Chao’s “Tone and Intonation in Chinese” Revisited

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Chao Yuen Ren (赵元任, 1892–1982) was a pioneer in structuralist phonological studies of Chinese, and his contributions had a wide-reaching impact not only in 20th-century China but also in the English-speaking linguistic community. In particular, Chao’s five-scale tonal notation was adopted into the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and is still used today for the analysis and transcription of tones and accents in various languages. However, despite the widespread citation of Chao’s analogy comparing tone and intonation as “small ripples on a large wave,” the theoretical and practical implications of his observations on this relationship have not been comprehensively explored.
This paper translates Chao Yuen Ren’s 1933 article, “Tone and Intonation in Chinese” (Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica 4:121–134), and offers a detailed commentary and review of his theory concerning the relationship between tone and intonation, as well as his analysis of the structure of intonation in Chinese. There are two main reasons for this in-depth introduction and discussion of Chao’s “Tone and Intonation in Chinese.” First, Chao’s observations on prosodic phenomena in Chinese—such as tone, tonal variation, stress, and intonation—continue to hold significant theoretical implications for the study of prosody in Chinese dialects and the comparative study of prosody across languages, even though his analyses were conducted with the limited phonetic tools and methods available at the time. Second, despite the frequent citation of Chao’s analogy between tone and intonation as “small ripples on a large wave,” his observations and theories on their relationship have not been thoroughly addressed. In particular, later research has often been confined to limited interpretations and applications of Chao’s theories on intonational elements and structures.
This paper, therefore, translates and introduces Chao’s classic article, “Tone and Intonation in Chinese”, which serves as the foundation of his prosodic theory, and discusses its key features and developments as reflected in a series of his works (Chao 1922, 1929, 1932ab, 1933, 1959ab, 1968, etc.). By doing so, this study seeks to examine how Chao’s theories should be interpreted and applied to ensure methodological rigor in research on Chinese prosody.