Phonetic and Phonological Analysis of Focal Accents of Disyllabic Words in Standard Chinese

摘要

The article investigates the phonetic and phonological property of focal accents conveyed by disyllabic focused words with various tonal combinations in Standard Chinese. Phonetically, the effect of focal accents upon f_0 resides in two aspects: the manner and the condition of focal accents. Phonologically, the distribution of focal accents is mainly concerned. Acoustic and perceptual experiments and the underlying tonal target of focused constituents are employed in both phonetic realization and phonological analysis. Major findings are that: f_0 ranges of focused words are expanded as the H tones of both focused syllables are raised; the f_0 of the post-focus syllables are compressed obviously in the way the H tones of Tonel and Tone2 are lowered; the realization of accents is closely related to the tonal target of the focused words; specifically, accents influence the acoustic performances of tones; furthermore, the combination of H/L determines the distribution of accents.