Pitch realization of post-focus components in Chongming Chinese

Abstract

Prosodic focus makes use of pitch to highlight part of an utterance. It has been generally found that a focused component is realized with an expanded pitch range, and there is evidence suggesting that a post-focus component may be associated with a reduced or compressed pitch range, the phenomenon of which is further coined as post-focus compression (PFC). However, the presence or absence of PFC seems to diverge even within thesame language family, and what is more interesting is the potential interaction between focus and lexical tones in tone languages. The current project thus aims to investigate whether PFC is present and how post-focus pitch is realized in Chongming Chinese, an under-documented language with eight tones. Specifically, we conducted a production experiment in which 20 target words varying in consonants, vowels and tones were selected, four focus conditions (no focus, pre-focus, on focus and post-focus) were designed, and four tonal contexts with different proceeding and following syllables were manipulated. Linear mixed-effects models were fitted to examine the effects of these variables on the realization of pitch contours in the postfocus components and also tackle the interactions among them. Our findings contribute novel data to the prosodic typology literature.