An acoustic study of the effects of sentential focus on Cantonese tones.

摘要

Existing prosodic studies of Cantonese examine primarily the interaction of tone and intonation (e.g., Johnson, 1987; Vance, 1976). Relatively little attention has been paid to how prominence within an utterance, which can be manifested by focus, affects Cantonese tones.;The function of focus is to help speakers convey their main point or the burden of the message (Halliday, 1970: 40). Focus can be marked syntactically by processes like topicalization. This study, however, is limited to investigating how the prosodic marking of focus influences the fundamental frequency (F0) and duration of Cantonese tones.;This study has brought forward the importance of identifying prosodic phrases and boundaries phonetically in future research on sentence prosody. The F0 and duration findings could serve as a linguistic basis for developing a tone recognition model of Cantonese connected speech. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)