This paper examines the duration modification of contrastive focus among lexical tones in Standard Chinese where focus co-occurs with focus adverbs.Focus is assigned to the first syllable of monomorphemic disyllabic w...This paper examines the duration modification of contrastive focus among lexical tones in Standard Chinese where focus co-occurs with focus adverbs.Focus is assigned to the first syllable of monomorphemic disyllabic word stimuli in utterance medial and final positions.Results show that(a)duration of focused syllables is invariably longer than unfocused syllable,(b)focused and unfocused syllable duration differ significantly across tones with tone 2,the longest,followed by tones 4,3and tone 1,the shortest,(c)focused and unfocused syllable duration vary significantly as a function of sentence frame to which it is embedded.Interestingly,no significant duration difference is observed between sentence-medial and sentence-final positions.The results indicate that duration increases across tones,word positions and sentence frames to realize contrastive focus in addition to the semantic device of focus adverbs.展开更多
文摘This paper examines the duration modification of contrastive focus among lexical tones in Standard Chinese where focus co-occurs with focus adverbs.Focus is assigned to the first syllable of monomorphemic disyllabic word stimuli in utterance medial and final positions.Results show that(a)duration of focused syllables is invariably longer than unfocused syllable,(b)focused and unfocused syllable duration differ significantly across tones with tone 2,the longest,followed by tones 4,3and tone 1,the shortest,(c)focused and unfocused syllable duration vary significantly as a function of sentence frame to which it is embedded.Interestingly,no significant duration difference is observed between sentence-medial and sentence-final positions.The results indicate that duration increases across tones,word positions and sentence frames to realize contrastive focus in addition to the semantic device of focus adverbs.
