Tonal Prosody in Chinese Parallel Prose

Abstract

Parallelism in Chinese has a long history, and is found in some of the earliest written texts as well as official speeches. By late Six Dynasties times, there were three separate styles of parallelistic composition: plain, rhyming, and tonally alternating. The plain seems to have been the most ancient, and in the Six Dynasties remained common in formal settings, including letters and memorials. Rhyming was common in fine literature such asfuh M,t and admonitory genres including tzann K, ming A, and beiwen Iij1-. The tonally alternating of composition was associated with lesser forms, such as prefaces and the short formal letter known as chii At. In the Targ, this last style grew to be the dominant of composition in (pyanwen ,r,? ) proper, and it continued to be used in official memorials and elsewhere through modern times. In conception it is absolutely distinct from the rhyming style, because the second and fourth lines of a stanza, which rhyme in rhyming style, must be of opposite tones in preface and therefore cannot possibly rhyme. The preface is later than the others, and must have postdated the movement for tonal prosody in poetry. However, it is in the preface of parallel prose that the prosodic opposition of pyng and tzeh tones is first attested, predating its appearance in poetry. We shall also find that the very idea of a unified pyng tone category has been a literary fiction since perhaps the eighth or ninth century.