Wang Bei, Xu Yi, Ding Qifan
Institute of Chinese Minority Language and Literatures, Minzu University of China, Beijing, China.
Phonetica. 2018;75(1):24-56. doi: 10.1159/000453082. Epub 2017 Jun 9.
The current study investigates whether and how focus, phrase boundary and newness can be simultaneously marked in speech prosody in Mandarin Chinese. Homophones were used to construct three syntactic structures that differed only in boundary condition, focus was elicited by preceding questions, while newness of postboundary words was manipulated as whether they had occurred in the previous text. Systematic analysis of F0 and duration showed that (1) duration was a reliable correlate of boundary strength regardless of focus location, while involvement of F0 was only in terms of lowering of phrase-final F0 minima and raising of phrase-initial F0 minima at a relatively strong boundary, (2) postfocus compression (PFC) of F0 was applied across all boundaries, including those with long silent pauses (over 200 ms), and postfocus F0 was lowered to almost the same degree in all boundary conditions, and (3) newness of postfocus words had no systematic effect on F0 or duration. These results indicate that not only functionally focus is independent of prosodic structure and newness, but also phonetically its realization is separate from boundary marking. Focus is signaled mainly through pitch range adjustments, which can occur even across phrase breaks, whereas boundaries are mostly signaled by duration adjustments.
本研究探讨了在汉语普通话中，焦点、短语边界和新信息是否以及如何能在言语韵律中同时得到标记。利用同音词构建了三种仅在边界条件上有所不同的句法结构，通过前文的问题引出焦点，而后边界词的新信息则通过其是否在先前文本中出现来操控。对基频（F0）和时长的系统分析表明：（1）无论焦点位置如何，时长都是边界强度的可靠相关指标，而F0的参与仅体现在相对较强边界处短语末尾F0最小值的降低以及短语开头F0最小值的升高；（2）F0的焦点后压缩（PFC）适用于所有边界，包括那些有长静音停顿（超过200毫秒）的边界，并且在所有边界条件下焦点后的F0降低到几乎相同的程度；（3）焦点后词的新信息对F0或时长没有系统性影响。这些结果表明，不仅在功能上焦点独立于韵律结构和新信息，而且在语音上其实现也与边界标记分开。焦点主要通过音高范围调整来标记，即使跨越短语边界也可能发生，而边界大多通过时长调整来标记。
