Stress Shift Mechanism and its Role in Peking Dialect

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Abstract
This paper explores the relationship between stress patterns of disyllabic constructions in the Peking Dialect of Modern Chinese and their grammatical structure. It suggests that the existing diverse stress patterns represent different stages of stress shift which is the mechanism employed to signal a formative grammatical process leading from loose syntactical to close morphological constructions. It finally proposes that, apart from the well-known effects of stress shift such as the loss of the tone and reduction in the segmental structure of unstressed syllables, the process ultimately results in the fusion of syllables and the appearance of relatively more complex syllabic shapes.

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