Abstract
Focus plays a vital role in spoken communication. Unlike some languages in which word-level accent is assigned lexically, most Chinese words have no lexical constraint on accentuation at the word level. Thus, if a disyllabic word is to be focused on, Chinese speakers must decide which syllable, or indeed if both syllables, should be stressed. Moreover, the stress assignment of the focal words is affected by the semantic structure of the words, which are composed of meaningful characters. In this paper, the manner in which disyllabic focused words affect variations in the prosodic correlates is investigated, in terms of the semantic structures, stress patterns and tonal combinations of the words in Mandarin Chinese. The findings are summarized as follows. (1) The effects of semantic structures of the focused words on the prosodic correlates are completely mediated by the stress patterns. (2) The prosodic correlates of the second syllable of the focused word are more variable than those of the first syllable. Specifically, there is a significant asymmetry of vowel duration as well as fundamental frequency (F0) range between the pre-stressed and post-stressed syllables. Moreover, the tonal combination significantly affects the variations of both the vowel duration and F0 range.
