PHONETIC PATTERNS OF WORDS IN THEIR ORDINARY FUNCTIONS AND AS PARASITE WORDS (BASED ON CHINESE)

In the language, lexical units perform different functions and are characterized by different informativeness. Some of them can appear both in their usual meaning and as parasite words and thus perform double function. This paper aims at studying those words. We hypothesize that in Chinese spontaneous speech, the same words that appear in their usual meaning and as parasite words have different phonetic manifestation, particularly, the latter are used in weak forms more often. An acoustic study was performed to prove the hypothesis. The material was obtained from 6 young females Putonghua speakers. Five functional words 然后ranhou, 就是jiushi, 那个nage, 这个zhege, 那种nazhong were chosen for this study as far as they were relatively frequent and appeared in the speech of all the 6 subjects. In general, the obtained data proved the hypothesis. In both functions, weak forms were found with very few exceptions, however, the number of weak forms increased several times when functioning as parasite words. Different degrees of their incompleteness were noticed as a result of various modifications of the syllable elements as well as syllables liaison.