ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2024
ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2024

Focus Prosody in Shanghai Chinese

Jingwen Huang, Aijun Li, Zhiqiang Li

Shanghai Chinese exhibits distinct left-dominant (LD) and right-dominant (RD) tone sandhi patterns at the word and phrasal levels. This study examines the prosody of various focus structures in declarative and interrogative sentences of the Subject-Modifier-Verb-Object type, focusing on interaction between tone sandhi and intonation when target words receive focus. The results show that narrow focus (NF) leads to nuclear accent on the target words while the sentence stress predominantly manifests on the object in the context of broad focus (BF). Narrowly focused words positioned initially or in the middle of sentences show significantly extended pitch range and duration in comparison to those in BF. On the target words, the first syllables typically display a wider pitch range than second syllables in BF, but the second syllables often match or exceed the pitch range of the first in NF. In the sentence-final position, BF and NF produce no divergence in pitch and duration on target words, although tonal durations preceding target words in NF tend to be longer than those in BF. LD and RD patterns respond to focus prosody and intonation boundary differently, with the RD pattern observed more often in NF.