Prosodic focus marking in Bai-Mandarin sequential bilinguals’ Mandarin

Abstract

This study investigates the prosodic marking of focus in sequential bilinguals speaking Bai as their first language and Mandarin Chinese as their second language. Mandarin SVO sentences with varying information structure were elicited through a picture-matching task. The participants were primary school teachers in a Bai-speaking community. Our data shows that in their Mandarin the Bai-Mandarin sequential bilinguals lengthen the duration of the focal constituents in comparison to non-focal constituents. In addition, they expand the pitch range to distinguish focal constituents from postfocal constituents. However, focus types differing in size and contrastivity are not distinguished in duration or pitch. The present study thus provides evidence that sequential bilinguals mark focus prosodically in their L2 Mandarin, although their use of pitch as a prosodic cue for marking focus is less systematic in comparison to monolingual speakers of Mandarin.