Analysis of the effects of word emphasis and echo question on F0 contours of Cantonese utterances

Abstract

Word emphasis and question intonation have significant effects on F0 contours for various languages. This paper employs the command-response F0 model to investigate the effects of the two factors for Cantonese, a typical tone language with nine tones. Analysis shows that the main effect of word emphasis associated with narrow focus is not on tone command but on phrase command. An additional or a larger phrase command tends to occur immediately preceding the emphasized word. For the tone command of the emphasized word, duration may be lengthened but polarity and amplitude are hardly affected so that the inherent tone patterns are kept. Also, echo question will replace the tone command in the later part of the sentence-final syllable by a positive tone command of much larger amplitude than usual. Both the effects of the two factors can be embedded in the framework of our model.