Contrastive focus in Beijing Mandarin

Abstract

Contrastive focus in Beijing Mandarin. This study investigated the acoustic realization of contrastive focus in Beijing Mandarin. Here a contrastive focus is defined as a mechanism to signal contrast or make corrections in discourse. Two questions were asked. First, what are the acoustic cues employed to convey contrastive focus? Second, what are the linguistic constraints on the manifestation of prosodic cues? Four different renditions of each test sentence were elicited from the subjects with contrastive focus on different words to convey different pragmatic meanings. Preliminary results suggest: (1) All three acoustic cues under investigation F0, overall intensity, and duration are employed, with different degrees of consistency, to convey contrastive focus; (2) the manifestation of these cues also appear to be context sensitive. The implications of these phonetic facts for possible phonological organization of contrastive focus in Beijing Mandarin will be discussed. [Work supported by NSF Grant No. SBR 9600930 to Marie Huffman.]