Prosodic marking of focus in Nafsan
Rosey Billington
Janet Fletcher2019, Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Melbourne, Australia 2019
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Abstract
Languages use a variety of means to realise informational structure categories like topicalisation and focus. The interaction between prosody and focus realisation strategies was examined in Nafsan, a Southern Oceanic language of Vanuatu, in a series of tasks that were designed to explore prosodic realisation of informational and contrastive focus on nouns that were subjects or objects in mini-dialogues where word-order was manipulated. All speakers produced utterance-initial or utterance-final focal elements with a major pitch movement associated with the focused noun (subject or object). Focused nouns were also realised with a wider pitch and often realised in their own prosodic phrase compared to the same item in non-focal contexts. There was also significant syllable lengthening at the right edge of in-focus words. In utterance-initial contexts, post-focal material in Nafsan was almost always produced in a relatively compressed pitch range and there was evidence of de-phrasing of non-focal nouns regardless of utterance position, suggesting prosodic phrasing patterns similar to other languages with edge-marking prominence.
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Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 2018
We compare the use of prosodic prominence in English and French to convey focus. While previous studies have found these languages, and Germanic vs. Romance more generally, to differ in their use of prominence to encode focus (e.g., Ladd 1990; 1996; 2008; Lambrecht 1994; Cruttenden 1997; 2006), exactly what underlies the difference remains an open question. We investigate two possibilities: The difference between the languages could be due to a difference in their phonology, restricting the circumstances in which material can be prosodically reduced, as proposed in Féry (2014). Alternatively, there could be syntactic, semantic, and/or pragmatic differences concerning when prominence can be used to encode focus. We compare these hypotheses in a production study which varied the type of focus context (corrective, contrastive, parallelism) to establish the contextual conditions on when a shift in prosodic prominence can occur. The results confirm earlier claims that French uses prosodi...
3 How focus and givenness shape prosody
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Caroline Féry and Shinichiro Ishihara proposes a model of how syntax and information structure (focus and givenness) shape prosody where prosodic phrasing and tonal effects are kept apart. It is argued that the prosodic effects of syntactic structure and those of information structure should be kept apart. It is shown that in German and Japanese, syntactic structure primarily influences prosodic phrasing, which we assume to be recursive. Information structure, on the other hand, influences tonal structure, keeping phrasing intact. In a comparison between the two languages, it becomes apparent that prosodic domains corresponding to focus and givenness domains are subject to tonal readjustments. A further point made in the chapter is that the amount of downstep and reset of register domains is language‐dependent.
The prosody of Focus and Givenness in
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Proceedings of West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL) 34, 2017
This paper argues that Georgian, a language with a fixed structural position reserved for the focused element (immediately preverbal), also uses prosody to signal focus. Specifically, data from a preliminary study reported here shows that various types of foci – wh-questions (WHQ), yes-no questions (YNQ), and contrastive contexts – bear the same prosodic marker of focus: the phrase accent L, rigidly aligned with the penultimate syllable of the predicate. The advantage of the approach advocated here is that it provides a unified account for the prosodic realization of different types of focus in Georgian. The double-marking of the same feature in syntax and prosody raises questions as to why language does not rely on just one of these strategies.
Focus prosody in Japanese reconsidered
Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, 2018
The purpose of the paper is to examine how focus in Japanese is realized and perceived in various accentual conditions. Japanese is a pitch accent language where lexical items are divided into two groups: Accented (A) and Unaccented (U). Pierrehumbert and Beckman (1988) first pointed out that the focus prosody of A words and U words are different. Much work has been done on narrow focus in A words following their work. Some previous studies (Pierrehumbert and Beckman (1988), Ishihara (2003) among others) suggest that, for A words, focus boosts the pitch of the accent peak and triggers either compression of the pitch range and/or Downstep in the post-focal domain. On the other hand, the previous studies are not clear on how focus on U words is implemented. The lack of accent and apparent lack of pitch compression in their studies made it harder to measure the effects of a focus. In this paper, we would like to discuss (i) what types of cues make U words focused, and (ii) whether or not the effects of focus are strong enough to override other phrasing/pitch-manipulating effects such as Downstep and Downtrends. We have conducted a focus production experiment and a focus identification experiment which tightly controlled the focus status and accent status of word pairs (e.g. AA, AU, A[+F]U, AU[+F]) in the stimuli. We hypothesize that, similar to focus on A words, focused U words will be endowed with F0 Rise and Post-focal Fall. Also, if such acoustic marking is systematically used to mark focus on U words, we expect that listeners can identify focus with high accuracy. Our results show that U words have the focal characteristics of F0 Rise and Post-focal Fall. These focal features, however, failed to show up constantly in all sequences considered. We can say that F0 cues and focus prominence are not correlated so straightforwardly in Japanese. As the effects of focus on pitch were not strong enough in our production experiment, we predicted that participants would have difficulties in perceiving focus. Overall, there is no significant difference between focus on A words and focus on U words in perception. However when the focus is preceded or followed by a U word, the identification ratio of the focus on U words is significantly lower than the focus on A words in the same context. F0 Rise and Post-focal Fall are the cues of focus listeners rely on, but, as the cues are not clearly distinguishable from cues to lexical accents, confusion will be caused. There is no clear-cut categorical cue to focus that we could find. There are controversies over whether focus builds its own independent prosodic phrase (e.g. Sugahara (2003), Ishihara (2003)). If focus necessarily initiates a new Phonological (Major) Phrase, we would not expect such murky results as ours, so we should conclude that focus does not initiate a new prosodic category, which accords with Ishihara (2003) and others.
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Prosodic Focus in Malay without Post-focus Compression
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Prosodic and syntactic constraints conflict with each other. This is particularly evident in the expression of focus, where the best position for main stress does not necessarily match the best syntactic position for the focused constituent. But focus and stress must match, therefore either stress or the focused constituent must renounce their best position violating either the syntactic or the prosodic constraints responsible for them. This study argues that human language addresses this tension in optimality theoretic terms and that different focus paradigms across different languages reflect different rankings of a shared invariant set of syntactic and prosodic constraints. In particular, only an optimality analysis can account for the focus paradigm of Italian while keeping a prosodic analysis of main stress in accord with the last two decades of phonological research. The analysis extends naturally to focus paradigms in English, French, and Chichewa (including Chichewa's non-culminant sentences, i.e. sentences lacking a single main stress), making no appeal to language specific parametric devices. Overall, the conflicting nature of prosodic and syntactic constraints gives rise to a complex crosslinguistic typology from a single set of universal constraints while keeping interface conditions to an absolute minimum. (3) Italian: Ha riso GIANNI f Context: Who has laughed? Has laughed John
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Laboratory Phonology, 2017
Focus marking is an important function of prosody in many languages. While many phonological accounts concentrate on fundamental frequency (F0), studies have established several additional cues to information structure. However, the relationship between these cues is rarely investigated. We simultaneously analyzed five prosodic cues to focus-F0 range, word duration, intensity, voice quality, the location of the F0 maximum, and the occurrence of pauses-in a set of 947 simple Subject Verb Object (SVO) sentences uttered by 17 native speakers of Finnish. Using random forest and generalized additive mixed modelling, we investigated the systematicity of prosodic focus marking, the importance of each cue as a predictor, and their functional shape. Results indicated a highly consistent differentiation between narrow focus and givenness, marked by at least F0 range, word duration, intensity, and the location of the F0 maximum, with F0 range being the most important predictor. No cue had a linear relationship with focus condition. To account for the simultaneous significance of several predictors, we argue that these findings support treating multiple prosodic cues to focus in Finnish as correlates of prosodic phrasing. Thus, we suggest that prosodic phrasing, having multiple functions, is also marked with multiple cues to enhance communicative efficiency.
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Word order and tonal shape in the production of focus in short
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This paper presents results from a study on the production of Finnish prosody. The effect of word order and the tonal shape in the production of Finnish prosody was studied as produced by 8 native Finnish speakers. Predictions formulated with regard to results from an earlier study pertaining to the perception of prominence were tested. These predictions had to do with the tonal shape of the utterances in the form of a flat hat pattern and the effect of word order on the so called top-line declination within an adverbial phrase in the utterances. The results from the experiment give support to the following claims: the temporal domain of prosodic focus is the whole utterance, word order reversal from unmarked to marked has an effect on the production of prosody, and the production of the tonal aspects of focus in Finnish follows a basic flat hat pattern. That is the prominence of a word can be produced by an f 0 rise or a fall, depending on the location of the word in an utterance. The basic accentual shape of a Finnish word is then not a pointed rise/fall hat shape as claimed before since it can vary depending on the syllable structure and the position within an utterance.
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