Elements and formation principle of rhythm in Chinese poetry
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1207.2

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    Abstract:

    Since ancient Greek Socrates put forward "not beautiful, bad rhythm, disharmony, are due to bad language and bad temperament; beauty, good rhythm and harmony are all due to the wisdom and kindness of the soul", rhythm has always been the basic problem of Chinese and Western poetics and promoting the development of poetry art. However, there is still a lack of comprehensive and systematic demonstration of the elements and formation principles of rhythm in Chinese poetry. Starting from the language "dynamic basis" proposed by Sapir, this paper compares the "dynamic characteristics" of Chinese and English, and makes a comprehensive investigation of Chinese ancient and modern poetry to find that the rhythm of Chinese poetry is characterized by "disyllabification". On the explicit level, "disyllabification" is the most common standard combination, such as "startled by magpies leaving the branch in moonlight, I hear cicadas shrill in the breeze at midnight". On the implicit level, it is shown as "lengthening" of single tone, "shortening" of triple tone, and forced syncopation of beyond three tone to approach the duration of double tone, such as "in lagging spring, hills and rivers look fair; in vernal breeze, plants and flowers spew scents". A slight pause in a poem can highlight, reinforce the effect of "disyllabification" and form a "prosodic boundary". Chinese function words and "word length flexibility" are efficient grammatical tools to support the combination of "disyllabification". "Disyllabification", "pause", "function word" and "word length flexibility" can be called the four elements of Chinese poetry rhythm. As dissyllables are the most efficient combination method in Chinese, the dissyllables in the modern Chinese lexicon account for an overwhelming majority-more than 90% according to Lv Shuxiang's statistics. Therefore, more than half of the Chinese poems or lines are naturally dissyllabic structures. By taking "disyllabification" as the core and further utilizing grammatical means such as Chinese function words, "word length flexibility" and "recessive disyllabification", the rhythm of Chinese poetry can be effectively configured and formed, thus it can be called "diphonic derived" rhythm. The rhythm of Chinese poetry has three advantages. Firstly, the configuration is easy, because the "disyllabification" of the Chinese language is extremely strong. Secondly, the sense of rhythm is strong, because the slight pauses in the verse create very clear "prosodic boundary". Thirdly, it is more orderly, because the writing and pronunciation of Chinese characters have the characteristics of "equal length" and "equal time", and the disyllabification structure in Chinese has a significant advantage, which is different from English, whose words have different lengths and pronunciations. Therefore, Chinese has the characteristics of a natural poetic language.

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张中宇.汉语诗歌节奏构成要素及其形成原理[J].重庆大学学报社会科学版,2023,29(5):173~183

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  • Online: October 24,2023
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