Dual-focus intonation in Standard Chinese

Abstract

This paper examines prosodic encoding of dual focus in Standard Chinese, that is, a sentence contains two foci. Five speakers read 10 SVO sentences with two lengths (short vs. long) in four focus conditions: initial, final, dual (initial+final) and neutral. Following results were obtained for the dual focus sentences: [1] There was an increase in F0 and word duration in both foci, and this to almost the same degree as their initial and final focus counterparts respectively; [2] The word following the first focus did not differ from its neutral and final counterparts in F0 and duration; [3] No prosodic boundary was inserted after the first focus and the two foci were realized in one intonational phrase. All these results held for both the short and the long sentences. From a theoretical perspective, culminativity (i.e. one metrical prominence per prosodic constituent) is violable in Chinese and focus assignment and phrasing are largely independent of each other.