Multiple focus in Mandarin Chinese

Intonation phrases and speech acts

“…Thus, building on Schwarzschild (1999), the correct rule that defines the minimum of stress in multiple-focus constructions seems to be (75a). This is endorsed in Kabagema-Bilan et al (2011) and employed in Truckenbrodt (2012,2013). It seems to hold in addition to (10), which is repeated here as (75b).…”

Phonetic realizations of post-nuclear accent under dual-focus conditions in Standard Chinese

“…There is no obvious difference in various focused regions. We suggest that it is not the case that each [F]-feature [10] directly triggers raising in Focus, but the following lowering and compression is more reliable which has an anticipatory effect from the following post-nuclear accent and prosodic boundary.…”

“…Previous research showed that SC has the phonological entities of nuclear accent and pre-nuclear accent, and in the double and multiple foci conditions, the rightmost component, as the default position, is the nuclear accent bearing unit [12]. In the study by Kabagema-Bilan et al [10], the first two foci did not show F0 effects, and no subsequent F 0 lowering or compression of F 0 range was found after the first focus. When having controlled the corrective or contrastive focus at the start of the sentences (i.e., Subjects), we obtained some new findings related to dual foci realization.…”

“…In single focus condition, when at the leftmost position, the Subject was realized as nuclear accent, but there could be another postnuclear accent if a PP boundary exists. For dual-focus conditions, when in the normal condition [10], the rightmost focus is realized as a nuclear accent, and the first one could be realized as a pre-nuclear accent in Standard Chinese. While for this study, the controlled left-headed corrective focus is realized as a nuclear accent on Subject (left headed constituent), the second focus is realized as a post-nuclear accent.…”

“…In a study on English, Eady et al [8] studied sentences, such as "The teacher gave the paper to the student", and observed that the word following an initial focused item in a double-focus sentence did not have the low F-value characteristics of words that follow focused items. In a study on Chinese, Kabagema-Bilan et.al [10] studied the multiple (non-sentence-final) foci in Mandarin and reported that each focus may require some prominences. But they assumed that in the multiple-focus condition, prominence is assigned to the rightmost focus: multiple focus in Mandarin shows phonetic focus effects on the second, but not on the first of the two foci.…”