Prosodic Marking of “Sentence-Focus” in Chinese

Abstract

This paper discusses the marking of Sentence-Focus (SF) in Chinese within the framework of Lambrecht (2000), on the assumption that Predicate-Focus (PF) sentences are unmarked. In Chinese, morphosyntactic means cannot ordinarily be employed for SF marking when the referent of the subject is identifiable to the addressee. This study acoustically analyzed PF and SF sentences with identifiable subjects and compared them. The findings are as follows: (a) the duration of the subject relative to that of the entire sentence is longer in SF sentences than in PF sentences, regardless of the lexical tone; and (b) in most cases, either the f₀ range expansion of the subject or the f₀ range compression of the predicate, or both, occur in SF sentences. These findings indicate that when morphosyntactic means cannot be employed, SF marking is implemented by making the subject constituent prosodically prominent in Chinese, and that the principle of detopicalization—a hypothesis proposed by Lambrecht—holds for this language.