Проблемы китайского и общего языкознания. К 90-летию С. Е. Яхонтова

 615  The Structure of the Mandarin Syllable: why, when and how to teach it   a wide-range of purposes in society. Thus its orthography does not always faithfully reflect the underlying phonological structure of the syllables. For example, let us look at the morpheme 贵 “expensive”: its standard Pīnyīn notation is guì ; yet the final is phonologically / uei /, not */ ui / — the main vowel / e / is left out in standard orthography. Should we need to provide or clarify the underlying phonological form of a particular Pīnyīn item (es- pecially in the case of a discrepancy between a phonological structure and standard orthography), we provide its phonological representation, enclosed in slanted brackets. For example, the sound form of the above mentioned morpheme 贵 “expensive” can be represented in three clearly distinguished ways: a standard Pīnyīn orthography would be guì (italics, no brackets), an underlying phonological representation would be / guei / 4 (italics, slanted brackets), and a transcription in the IPA would be [kweɪ] 4 (the IPA sym- bols, square brackets). When there is no discrepancy between the Pīnyīn orthography of an item and its phonological representation (e. g. huai vs. / huai /), or no need to point out the phonological representation of an item, slanted brackets are generally not used. Note that such a discrepancy may happen only in the notation of finals; there are no such cases in the notation of initials. In Chinese, a syllable is a linguistic unit of utmost importance: among other functions, it serves as the carrier of a morpheme. In other words, one syllable corresponds to one morpheme in most cases. Mandarin syllabary is rather meager: it comprises of only about 400 segmental syllables, or 1,300 tonal syllables. In learning Mandarin Chinese, mastering the basic syllabary represents a crucial step in the process of mastering the spoken language. A poor command of the pronunciation of the isolated syllables at the very beginning of the process of studying the language can undermine the whole spoken language competence of the student in the future. Furthermore, prob- lems with the production of syllables may go hand in hand with problems of perception — both on the side of a language student himself/herself, and on the side of a native Chinese attempting to comprehend his/her speech. Thus, it is rather obvious that reaching maximum efficiency in teaching basic Mandarin syllabary is a highly important pedagogical goal. The standard procedure [Shen 2006] is roughly as follows: • A student is told that every Mandarin syllable is composed of three components: an initial, a final, and a tone. • The inventories of the initials (21 items), finals (ca. 35 items) and tones (4 items) are listed. • The whole inventory of syllables is introduced step by step, each newly taught segmental syllable being presented as a combination of a par-