This book is based on the author's doctoral dissertation on research of the rhythm of modern Chinese language. The author provides a comprehensive review of the research on language rhythm at home and abroad, with special focus on the research of Chinese rhythm in middle and late 1980's and from 1990's to today. The author thinks that the research of language rhythm should be based on the "rhythm pivot" which varies from language to language. He states that the stress is the rhythm pivot of English but not of Chinese. In Chinese language stress only functions on the expression level, and is related to the information focus, while not to the lexical meaning. Therefore he further argues that the rhythm pivot of Chinese is not stress, but pause. This research is of significant value for the Chinese rhythm research, language engineering and teaching Chinese as a foreign language.

Liu Xianqiang received his PhD in Chinese linguistics and applied linguistics of Peking University, and started teaching Chinese (as a foreign language) in Beijing Language and Culture University since 2002. His research interests lie in linguistics theories, phonetics, prosody, etc. He has published papers such as Complexity and possible controlling factors of rhythm of Chinese adverbial-verb structure seen from "也" and "中", Initial exploration of the rhythm pivot of modern Chinese language, etc.