Japanese focus prosody revisited: Freeing focus from prosodic phrasing

Ishihara, Shinichiro

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2011.06.008

Cited by 37 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Some have argued that speakers are free to place pitch accents on whichever part of an utterance they wish to highlight rather than being dictated by a prosodic structure (Bolinger, 1972;Chafe, 1974;Halliday, 1967). Recently, it has been shown that even for languages that have been argued to mark focus by changing phrase structure (Korean: Jun, 1993; Japanese: Nagahara, 1994, andPierrehumbert andBeckman, 1988), no sign of phrasal marking for focus can be found once focus and phrasing are independently controlled (Ishihara, 2011;Kubozono, 2007;Lee and Xu, 2012). It has also been shown that durational adjustments for boundary and focus are largely independent of each other.…”

Section: Boundary Markingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There has been rich empirical evidence that in many languages focus is realized mainly by increasing the pitch range, intensity, duration, and articulatory fullness of the focused word, and reducing the F 0 and intensity of the following words, while leaving the prefocus words largely unchanged (English: Cooper et al, 1985;de Jong, 1995;Xu and Xu, 2005;Mandarin: Chen and Gussenhoven, 2008;Xu, 1999;German: Féry and Kügler, 2008;Greek: Botinis et al, 1999;Dutch: Swerts et al, 2002;Japanese: Ishihara, 2002; Korean: Lee and Xu, 2010;Turkish: Ipek, 2011;Tibetan: Wang et al, 2012;Zhang et al, 2012;Estonian: Sahkai et al, 2013). The reduction of postfocus F 0 and intensity is known as postfocus compression or PFC , and it is found to be critical for focus perception in at least some of these languages (Vainio et al, 2003, for Finnish;Rump and Collier, 1996, for Dutch;Prom-on et al, 2009, for English;Ishihara, 2011, andSugahara, 2005, for Japanese; Xu, 2005, andXu et al, 2012, for Mandarin). What is yet unclear, and in fact rarely asked, is how extensive the temporal domain of PFC is.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Interactive Prosodic Marking of Focus, Boundary and Newness in Mandarin

Wang

Ding

2017

Phonetica

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The current study investigates whether and how focus, phrase boundary and newness can be simultaneously marked in speech prosody in Mandarin Chinese. Homophones were used to construct three syntactic structures that differed only in boundary condition, focus was elicited by preceding questions, while newness of postboundary words was manipulated as whether they had occurred in the previous text. Systematic analysis of F0 and duration showed that (1) duration was a reliable correlate of boundary strength regardless of focus location, while involvement of F0 was only in terms of lowering of phrase-final F0 minima and raising of phrase-initial F0 minima at a relatively strong boundary, (2) postfocus compression (PFC) of F0 was applied across all boundaries, including those with long silent pauses (over 200 ms), and postfocus F0 was lowered to almost the same degree in all boundary conditions, and (3) newness of postfocus words had no systematic effect on F0 or duration. These results indicate that not only functionally focus is independent of prosodic structure and newness, but also phonetically its realization is separate from boundary marking. Focus is signaled mainly through pitch range adjustments, which can occur even across phrase breaks, whereas boundaries are mostly signaled by duration adjustments.

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Section: Boundary Markingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interactive Prosodic Marking of Focus, Boundary and Newness in Mandarin

Wang

Ding

2017

Phonetica

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“…Much work has been done on the narrow focus on A words following their work, and the literature (cf. Sugahara (2003), Shinya et al (2004), Ishihara (2003Ishihara ( , 2011bIshihara ( , 2016, among others) found that the F0 cues of narrow focus on A words are characterized by F0 range expansion (F0 Rise) and post-focal F0 range compression (Post-focal Fall). Not much work on focus prosody of U words is, however, done in the literature -partly because there is no accent or subsequent downstep in U words, though we do have a vague understanding that the pitch is raised when an U word is focused (Ishihara (2011a), Sugahara (2003).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Focus prosody in Japanese reconsidered

Mizuguchi¹,

Tateishi²

2018

Proc Ling Soc Amer

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Abstract. The purpose of the paper is to examine how focus in Japanese is realized and perceived in various accentual conditions. Japanese is a pitch accent language where lexical items are divided into two groups: Accented (A) and Unaccented (U). Pierrehumbert and Beckman (1988) first pointed out that the focus prosody of A words and U words are different. Much work has been done on narrow focus in A words following their work. Some previous studies (Pierrehumbert and Beckman (1988), Ishihara (2003) among others) suggest that, for A words, focus boosts the pitch of the accent peak and triggers either compression of the pitch range and/or Downstep in the post-focal domain. On the other hand, the previous studies are not clear on how focus on U words is implemented. The lack of accent and apparent lack of pitch compression in their studies made it harder to measure the effects of a focus.In this paper, we would like to discuss (i) what types of cues make U words focused, and (ii) whether or not the effects of focus are strong enough to override other phrasing/pitch-manipulating effects such as Downstep and Downtrends. We have conducted a focus production experiment and a focus identification experiment which tightly controlled the focus status and accent status of word pairs (e.g. AA, AU, A[+F]U, AU [+F]) in the stimuli. We hypothesize that, similar to focus on A words, focused U words will be endowed with F0 Rise and Post-focal Fall. Also, if such acoustic marking is systematically used to mark focus on U words, we expect that listeners can identify focus with high accuracy.Our results show that U words have the focal characteristics of F0 Rise and Post-focal Fall. These focal features, however, failed to show up constantly in all sequences considered. We can say that F0 cues and focus prominence are not correlated so straightforwardly in Japanese. As the effects of focus on pitch were not strong enough in our production experiment, we predicted that participants would have difficulties in perceiving focus. Overall, there is no significant difference between focus on A words and focus on U words in perception. However when the focus is preceded or followed by a U word, the identification ratio of the focus on U words is significantly lower than the focus on A words in the same context. F0 Rise and Post-focal Fall are the cues of focus listeners rely on, but, as the cues are not clearly distinguishable from cues to lexical accents, confusion will be caused. There is no clear-cut categorical cue to focus that we could find.There are controversies over whether focus builds its own independent prosodic phrase (e.g. Sugahara (2003), Ishihara (2003)). If focus necessarily initiates a new Phonological (Major) Phrase, we would not expect such murky results as ours, so we should conclude that focus does not initiate a new prosodic category, which accords with Ishihara (2003) and others. Keywords. focus; prosody; prosodic categories; accent; intonation; Japanese * The authors hereby express their utmost gratitude to Tim M...

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“…It has been repeatedly noted in the literature that the LHL contour involved in the reduced items in (21) (noMIya-de 'bar-at' and NOnda 'drank') is compressed but has not entirely disappeared, as can be observed in the pitch-track diagram in (21) (Maekawa (1994), Kitagawa (2005), Ishihara (2011)). Since the initial rise (LH) is observed in these prosodic words, their MiP boundaries must have been retained, contrary to the prosodic structure assumed for (20i).…”

Section: Prosodic Boundaries and Wh-questionsmentioning

confidence: 80%

Uttering and Interpreting Trees

Kitagawa

2013

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Uttering Trees, by Norvin Richards, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2010, x+ 233pp.This article first selectively overviews the discussion on the interaction of phonology and syntax offered in Richards (2010), then pursues the same project from a different angle. Pointing out that both wh-in-situ and overt wh-movement express sound-meaning correlations by appealing to some physical marking at surface level, we propose that both should be regarded as instances of overt syntax. Accordingly, the notion 'overt syntax' is redefined as the grammatical procedure that synchronizes PF-and LF-effects. We then argue that the synchronized PF-LF effects of overt syntax can be captured if feature complexes that induce the legibility of linguistic expressions at PF and at LF are encoded into lexical items.*

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Japanese focus prosody revisited: Freeing focus from prosodic phrasing

Cited by 37 publications

References 16 publications

Interactive Prosodic Marking of Focus, Boundary and Newness in Mandarin

Interactive Prosodic Marking of Focus, Boundary and Newness in Mandarin

Focus prosody in Japanese reconsidered

Uttering and Interpreting Trees

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