Prosody of focus marking in Ewe

Fiedler, Ines; Jannedy, Stefanie

doi:10.1515/jall-2013-0001

Cited by 10 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Specifically, in tone languages, morpho-syntactically unmarked (in-situ) focus can be marked with the use of various prosodic means. The variation includes the modification of scaling relations such as higher pitch range on the focused constituent and compression of the F0 of the post-focal part (PFC), as in Mandarin Chinese [13], longer duration of the focused constituent, as in Ewe [14], boundary insertion or enhancement, as in Naxi [15], and even no prosodic marking is possible, as in Northern Sotho [16], Hausa [17], and Yucatec Maya ( [18], [19]). To the best of our knowledge, no categorical prosodic means marking different focus types for tone languages are reported.…”

Section: Prosody Of In-situ Focus In Tone Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Focus and its prosody in Akan and Ga

Genzel¹,

Renans²,

Kügler³

2018

Speech Prosody 2018

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The paper investigates the prosodic effects of focus in morpho-syntactically unmarked simple sentences in the tone languages Akan and Ga (Kwa). We compare broad focus realizations to either narrow contrastive focus (Akan) or narrow informational focus (Ga) on the subject and the object. The results show that in-situ focus in both languages is not marked by a specific categorical prosodic device. While Akan shows a tendency to lower the intensity of the post-focal part, Ga speakers have the option to slightly raise the F0 of a focused object. The findings are discussed with regards to focus-prominence, focus alignment as well as the Nostratic origin hypothesis of post-focal compression.

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Section: Prosody Of In-situ Focus In Tone Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Focus and its prosody in Akan and Ga

Genzel¹,

Renans²,

Kügler³

2018

Speech Prosody 2018

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“…There are syntactic options such as cleft structures and scrambling of word order [6][7][8][9][10]; there may be relevant morphological markers [11][12][13]; and there are prosodic changes in phrasing or in the phonetic implementation of the focused element and the surrounding material [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24].…”

Section: Introduction mentioning

confidence: 99%

A crosslinguistic study of prosodic focus

Lee

Wang

Chen

et al. 2015

2015 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)

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We examined the production and perception of (contrastive) prosodic focus, using a paradigm based on digit strings, in which the same material and discourse contexts can be used in different languages. We found a striking difference between languages like English and Mandarin Chinese, where prosodic focus is clearly marked in production and accurately recognized in perception, and languages like Korean, where prosodic focus is neither clearly marked in production nor accurately recognized in perception. We also present comparable production data for Suzhou Wu, Japanese, and French.

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“…There are a considerable number of studies investigating the prosodic realization of focus cross linguistically, which also covers the prosody of given information and which might involve repeated words. However, these studies do not directly address repetition effects and commonly make use of question-answer sequences (i.e., manipulated discourse structures) to elicit different focus types (e.g., Burdin et al, 2015; Fiedler & Jannedy, 2013). Studies on repetition reduction, on the other hand, include either spontaneous speech from corpora or semi-spontaneous dialogues from experimental tasks in which referential structures are generally not manipulated.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Repetition Reduction Revisited: The Prosody of Repeated Words in Papuan Malay

Kaland

Himmelmann

2019

Lang Speech

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It has frequently been shown that speakers prosodically reduce repeated words in discourse. This phenomenon has been claimed to facilitate speech recognition and to be language universal. In particular, the relationship between the information value of a word in a discourse context and its prosodic prominence have been shown to correlate. However, a literature review provided in this paper reveals that most evidence comes from English, where prosodic marking of information status often coincides with repetition reduction. The current study investigates to what extent repetition reduction occurs in Papuan Malay, spoken in the western part of the island of New Guinea (Indonesia). The work on Papuan Malay prosody available to date suggests fundamental differences compared to English and other Germanic languages. An acoustic analysis is carried out on repeated words in short stories produced by native Papuan Malay speakers. The results show that upon repetition, words were shortened and produced with higher F0. In a subsequent word identification task, it was found that first and second mentions were equally intelligible. Conclusions partially confirm previous work and challenge theories on how the prosody and information value of a word are related.

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Prosody of focus marking in Ewe

Cited by 10 publications

References 0 publications

Focus and its prosody in Akan and Ga

Focus and its prosody in Akan and Ga

A crosslinguistic study of prosodic focus

Repetition Reduction Revisited: The Prosody of Repeated Words in Papuan Malay

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