Issues in Chinese Prosody : Conceptual Foundations of a Linguistically-Motivated Text-to-Speech System for Mandarin

I examine various controversial aspects of Chinese prosody–tone structure, syllable structure, stress, and intonation–and stress the need to view all of these as interacting systems, aspects of a hierarchical prosodic structure. I examine various proposals at these various levels of the hierarchy and suggest which are most appropriate. Specifically, I suggest the adoption of Bao's version of syllable and tone, and Chen's account of stress. As for intonation, it is still not possible to make any definitive claims regarding an optimal model, but I examine work done by Kratochvil, Shih, and Garding et al, and suggest promising directions for future work.