Abstract
Post-focus compression (PFC) has been claimed to be a “hard-to-evolve,” inherent prosodic feature that may have a single historical origin (Proto-Nostratic). This study explored the distribution of PFC in two sub-dialects of Malaysian Hokkien (Southern Min Chinese), i.e., Penang Hokkien (PH) and Melaka Hokkien (MH), using novel experimental designs and statistical techniques (SS ANOVA). Specifically, in addition to the conventional nasal onset-only contexts, stop and fricative onset-only contexts were taken into consideration. We analyzed F0 and duration of the constituents in question under three focus conditions (Initial vs. Medial vs. Final focus in the Subject-Verb-Object frame). The results are (a) the presence of PFC may be dependent on different segmental contexts: in MH, PFC is attested in the stop onset-only environments but absent elsewhere and (b) the absence of PFC “induces” Post-focus shortening in the nasal and fricative-only contexts in MH and in all data in PH. The findings suggest that PFC may not be an “inherent” feature because MH and PH are closely related sub-dialects and both have had language contact with the same language, Malay. Finally, global F0 raising is found for the first time in Final focus (Object) in both MH and PH.
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