Prosodic Realization of Information Structure Categories in Standard Chinese
نویسندگان
چکیده
This paper investigates the prosodic realization of information structure categories in Standard Chinese. A number of proper names with different tonal combinations were elicited as a grammatical subject in five pragmatic contexts. Results show that both duration and F0 range of the tonal realizations were adjusted to signal the information structure categories (i.e. theme vs. rheme and background vs. focus). Rhemes consistently induced a longer duration and a more expanded F0 range than themes. Focus, compared to background, generally induced lengthening and F0 range expansion (the presence and magnitude of which, however, are dependent on the tonal structure of the proper names). Within the rheme focus condition, corrective rheme focus induced more expanded F0 range than normal rheme focus.
منابع مشابه
The Prosody of Discourse Structure and Content in the Production of Persian EFL Learners
The present research addressed the prosodic realization of global and local text structure and content in the spoken discourse data produced by Persian EFL learners. Two newspaper articles were analyzed using Rhetorical Structure Theory. Based on these analyses, the global structure in terms of hierarchical level, the local structure in terms of the relative importance of text segments and the ...
متن کاملPhonetic Realizations of Post-nuclear Accent under Dual-focus Conditions in Standard Chinese
Previous studies indicated that the rightmost unit is the default position for bearing nuclear accent in multiple-focus condition in Standard Chinese. The present research investigated the accent realization for dual-focus sentences which has a leftmost nuclear accent. The syntactic form of [Subject Verb (Modifier1) Object1 (Modifier2) Object2] was adopted. A corrective focus was always assigne...
متن کاملImpact of Prosodic Position on Vocalic Space in German and French
The relation between prosodic constituents of different levels (the prosodic hierarchy) and the realization of phonemes is investigated in French and German broadcast speech. Four levels of prosodic categories are defined and the boundaries are automatically derived using syntactic chunking and forced alignment. We show that the higher a vowel position within the prosodic structure, the more st...
متن کاملPost-focus pitch register lowering as a phrasal marker - An acoustic study of focus and phrasing in Shanghai Chinese
This paper reports an experiment designed to investigate whether post-focus tonal realization is constrained by prosodic structure in Shanghai Chinese (SH). Previous studies have shown that in SH, focus expanded the f0 range of bi-syllabic tone sandhi words while pitch register lowering, instead of pitch range compression, was consistently found on post-focus bi-syllabic tone sandhi words. The ...
متن کاملEffect of narrow focus on tonal realization in Georgian
This article examines the prosodic correlates of focus in Georgian declarative sentences, based on speech production data. Georgian is an intonation language with flexible word order, and it is sensitive to information structure. It is shown in the paper that focus has an impact on duration but does not systematically change the tonal realization of the constituents. Most prosodic correlates of...
متن کامل