Prosodic characteristics of two focus types in emphatic context in Thai

Abstract

This study presents an acoustic analysis of narrow focus (early focus) and broad focus, each in emphatic context (tune) in Thai, with the goal of providing a basic characterization of their prosody. To investigate prosodic realizations, target words from each of the 5 lexical tones in Thai were placed in subject and object positions of sentences with SVO structure. Each target word was placed in a sentence in which each syllable contained the same lexical tone as that of the target word. Results show that F0 measures, especially F0 maximum, minimum, and range, differed between focus types. In particular, narrow focused words were distinguished from non-narrow focused by higher F0 maximum, minimum, and range, while post-focal words contained lower F0 measures. Syllable duration also played a role in signaling narrow focus: focal words in narrow focus sentences were significantly longer than their non-focal counterparts in broad focus sentences. Interestingly, a pitch reset seemed to occur post-focally. Results suggest that while in board focus sentences, sentence stress is aligned to the final syllables, in narrow focus sentences, the stress is divided into two parts: strong and weak; the former is aligned to early focused words while the latter to final syllables.