The Structure of the Mandarin Syllable: Why, When and How to Teach it

In this article, we shall be concerned with the isolated segmental syllable of Mandarin,1 and will be leaving aside the suprasegmental component of tone. A traditional model of the Chinese syllable (see Figure 2) splits up a syllable into two basic subsyllabic components: an initial (shēngmǔ 声母, i. e. an initial consonant), and a final (yùnmǔ 韵母, i. e. the rest of the syllable). This traditional analysis is not necessarily accepted by all phonologists (for an alternative solution, see Figure 4). However, in teaching Mandarin it has been employed more or less universally, since it was adopted as the basis for the widely accepted pīnyīn spelling system (pīnyīn is a major spelling tool used in current textbooks). Since we are concerned with methods of language teaching in this article, we shall follow this line and stick to pīnyīn in all respects. It is used for the notation of syllables, initials, finals, or particular sounds (it is always presented in italics). Pīnyīn symbols (not IPA symbols) are also used for phonological representation. Why do we need it? Since the pīnyīn system was not designed solely as a phonetic or phonological transcription tool but was fashioned to serve a wide-range of purposes in society, 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 (especially 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 IPA would be [kweI] 4 (IPA symbols, 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.