Pitch Range and Voice Quality in Dimasa Focus Intonation

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of Dimasa focus intonation. The acoustic analysis shows that narrow focus sentences undergo a jump in the pitch range irrespective of the underlying tonal value of the morpheme it attaches to. In addition to f0 expansion, the prosodic property of focus in Dimasa was found to have different (tense) phonation in morphologically marked narrow focus sentences when compared to the broad focus context. Thus, the tense phonation property of sentences bearing morphological focus is not only an acoustic property of a higher pitch range but may also be an acoustic cue of discourse-level intonation.