Revisiting prosodic focus in Cantonese: A pilot study

Abstract

Prosodic focus is a linguistic device that makes use of phonetic cues to structure the information delivered by the interlocutors. Previous studies have measured the effects of focus on fundamental frequency (F0), duration and intensity, and different patterns of focus realisation have been identified cross-linguistically. For example, while Mandarin makes extensive use of F0 to indicate focus [1], Cantonese relies largely on duration and intensity in marking focus [2]. According to [3], focus on one syllable increased not only the F0 of the target syllable, but also that of the preceding and following syllables in Cantonese, which was attributed to the proposal that focus in Cantonese has a wider domain than lexical tones. More recently, [4] examined how focus was realised within Cantonese complex nominal phrases, and their results suggested different F0 realisation between focus on the numeral and focus on the whole nominal phrase. The current study is an attempt to address the prosodic focus domain in Hong Kong Cantonese. We designed a focus production experiment and took into account the following categories when preparing the test stimuli: 1) a simple SVO sentence as in (1a) and a complex sentence with a relative clause (RC) as in (1b); 2) the head noun of the RC appeared in the subject and object positions as in (1b-c); and 3) the syntactic structure of the focused part (i.e., the whole verb phrase as in (1d) or the nominal phrase as in (1e)). Native speakers of Hong Kong Cantonese will be invited to participate in the recording. The collected speech samples will first be segmented, and time-normalised F0, mean F0, maximum F0, minimum F0, duration and mean intensity for each syllable will then be extracted with the ProsodyPro Praat script [5]. Linear mixed effects models will be used to test the main effects of and the interactions between the tested variables. (1) a. go2 zek3 maau1mi1 ling1 syu1baau1 ‘The cat is carrying a bag.’ b. [ling1 syu1baau1 go2 zek3 maau1mi1] hou2 dak1ji3 ‘The cat carrying a bag is very cute.’ c. ngo5 zung1ji3 [ling1 syu1baau1 go2 zek3 maau1mi1] ‘I like the cat carrying a bag.’ d. go2 zek3 maau1mi1 Focus[ling1 baau1] ‘The cat is carrying a bag.’ e. go2 zek3 maau1 ling1 Focus[syu1baau1] ‘The cat is carrying a bag.’