Phonetic realization of focus particles always and only in Korean: Theoretical implications of association with focus. ms (original) (raw)

PROSODIC CORRELATION BETWEEN THE FOCUSING ADVERB OZIK 'ONLY' AND FOCUS/GIVENNESS IN KOREAN

This study investigates the prosodic correlation between the focusing adverb ozik 'only' and focus/GIVENness in Korean. The goal is to test the issue of whether or not the element associated with ozik can be dephrased in Korean. This question is answered by a perceptual experiment in which the pitch contours of target sentences (i.e. Jeoneun ozik gichareul tamnida 'I only take the train' and Jeoneun ozik daehanhanggongeul iyonghamnida 'I only take Korean Air.') are modified using Praat. The modified sentences are embedded in two competing contexts in which focus/GIVENness on the element associated with ozik (i.e. gichareul 'the train', daehanhanggongeul 'Korean Air') is elicited. The results reveal that DoubleH (where both the focusing adverb and the object have prosodic prominence) is shown to be the most favored prosodic model when the element associated with ozik is focused in discourse. Conversely, OzikH (where the focusing adverb has prosodic prominence) is shown to be most favored when the element associated with ozik is GIVEN. Therefore, we argue that the element associated with ozik can be either prosodically prominent or dephrased depending on the discourse. This finding demonstrates that discourse functions such as focus and GIVENness are not directly contingent on the lexical semantics of the focusing adverb but instead are constrained by the discourse.

Prosody–Syntax Interaction in the Expression of Focus

Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 2005

Prosodic and syntactic constraints conflict with each other. This is particularly evident in the expression of focus, where the best position for main stress does not necessarily match the best syntactic position for the focused constituent. But focus and stress must match, therefore either stress or the focused constituent must renounce their best position violating either the syntactic or the prosodic constraints responsible for them. This study argues that human language addresses this tension in optimality theoretic terms and that different focus paradigms across different languages reflect different rankings of a shared invariant set of syntactic and prosodic constraints. In particular, only an optimality analysis can account for the focus paradigm of Italian while keeping a prosodic analysis of main stress in accord with the last two decades of phonological research. The analysis extends naturally to focus paradigms in English, French, and Chichewa (including Chichewa's non-culminant sentences, i.e. sentences lacking a single main stress), making no appeal to language specific parametric devices. Overall, the conflicting nature of prosodic and syntactic constraints gives rise to a complex crosslinguistic typology from a single set of universal constraints while keeping interface conditions to an absolute minimum. (3) Italian: Ha riso GIANNI f Context: Who has laughed? Has laughed John

Prosodic focus within and across languages

UPenn Ph.D. dissertation, 2015

The fact that “purely” prosodic marking of focus may be weaker in some languages than in others, and that it varies in certain circumstances even within a single language, has not been commonly recognized. Therefore, this dissertation investigated whether and how purely prosodic marking of focus varies within and across languages. We conducted production and perception experiments using a paradigm of 10-digit phone-number strings in which the same material and discourse contexts were used in different languages. The results demonstrated that prosodic marking of focus varied across languages. Speakers of American English, Mandarin Chinese, and Standard French clearly modulated duration, pitch, and intensity to indicate the position of corrective focus. Listeners of these languages recognized the focus position with high accuracy. Conversely, speakers of Seoul Korean, South Kyungsang Korean, Tokyo Japanese, and Suzhou Wu produced a weak and ambiguous modulation by focus, resulting in a poor identification performance. This dissertation also revealed that prosodic marking of focus varied even within a single language. In Mandarin Chinese, a focused low/dipping tone (tone 3) received a relatively poor identification rate compared to other focused tones (about 77% vs. 91%). This lower identification performance was due to the smaller capacity of tone 3 for pitch range expansion and local dissimilatory effects around tone 3 focus. In Seoul Korean, prosodic marking of focus differed based on the tonal contrast (post-lexical low vs. high tones). The identification rate of high tones was twice as high than that of low tones (about 24% vs. 51%), the reason being that low tones had a smaller capacity for pitch range expansion than high tones. All things considered, this dissertation demonstrates that prosodic focus is not always expressed by concomitant increased duration, pitch, and intensity. Accordingly, “purely” prosodic marking of focus is neither completely universal nor automatic, but rather is expressed through the prosodic structure of each language. Since the striking difference in focus-marking success does not seem to be determined by any previously-described typological feature, this must be regarded as an indicator of a new typological dimension, or as a function of a new typological space.

The prosodic expression of focus, contrast and givenness: A production study of Hungarian

Lingua, 2014

This paper reports the results of a production experiment that explores the prosodic 15 realization of focus in Hungarian, a language that is characterized by obligatory 16 syntactic focus marking. Our study investigates narrow focus in sentences in which 17 focus is unambiguously marked by syntactic means, comparing it to broad focus 18 sentences. Potential independent effects of the salience (textual givenness) of the 19 background of the narrow focus and the contrastiveness of the focus are controlled for 20 and are also examined. 21 The results show that both continuous phonetic measures and categorical factors 22 such as the distribution of contour types are affected by the focus-related factors, 23 despite the presence of syntactic focus marking. The phonetic effects found are mostly 24 parallel to those of typical prosodic focus marking languages like English. The prosodic 25 prominence required of focus is realized through changes to the scaling and slope of F0 26 targets and contours. The asymmetric prominence relation between the focus and the 27 background can be expressed not only by the phonetic marking of the prominence of 28 the focused element, but also by the phonetic marking of the reduced prominence of the 29 background. Furthermore, contrastiveness of focus and (textual) givenness of the 30 background show independent phonetic effects, both of them affecting the realization of 31 the background. These results are argued to shed light on alternative approaches to the 32 information structural notion of contrastive focus and the relation between the notions 33 of focus and givenness. 34 35 Keywords 36 Hungarian; prosody; focus; background; givenness; contrast 37 38 39 40 1. Introduction 41 42 There is a growing body of theoretical and experimental research on the prosodic 43 expression of information structure (IS) in linguistic utterances (or sentence-level 44 pragmatic meaning, in the sense of Ladd 2008), as well as its variation across languages. 45 Perhaps the best studied information structural status that can affect the prosodic 46 realization of sentences in systematic ways is focus. Prosodic focus marking is 47 characterized by rich variation across languages, including marking by tonal means 48 (like pitch scaling, and tonal alignment), by accent type, by prosodic phrasing (such as 49

A crosslinguistic study of prosodic focus

2015 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2015

We examined the production and perception of (contrastive) prosodic focus, using a paradigm based on digit strings, in which the same material and discourse contexts can be used in different languages. We found a striking difference between languages like English and Mandarin Chinese, where prosodic focus is clearly marked in production and accurately recognized in perception, and languages like Korean, where prosodic focus is neither clearly marked in production nor accurately recognized in perception. We also present comparable production data for Suzhou Wu, Japanese, and French.

Cross-language data on five types of prosodic focus

Speech Prosody 2016, 2016

To examine the relative roles of language-specific and language-universal mechanisms in the production of prosodic focus, we compared production of five different types of focus by native speakers of English and Mandarin. Two comparable dialogues were constructed for each language, with the same words appearing in focused and unfocused position; 48 speakers recorded two dialogues each in their respective native language. Duration, F 0 (mean, maximum, range), and rmsintensity (mean, maximum) of all critical word tokens were measured. Across the different types of focus, cross-language differences were observed in the degree to which English versus Mandarin speakers use the different prosodic parameters to mark focus, suggesting that while prosody may be universally available for expressing focus, the means of its employment may be considerably language-specific.

How focus and givenness shape prosody

Information structure, 2009

A model of how syntax and information structure (focus and givenness) shape prosody is proposed which keeps phrasing and tonal effects apart. It is argued that the prosodic effects of syntactic structure and those of information structure should be kept apart. It is shown that in German and Japanese, syntactic structure primarily influences prosodic phrasing, which we assume to be recursive.

3 How focus and givenness shape prosody

Information Structure, 2009

Caroline Féry and Shinichiro Ishihara proposes a model of how syntax and information structure (focus and givenness) shape prosody where prosodic phrasing and tonal effects are kept apart. It is argued that the prosodic effects of syntactic structure and those of information structure should be kept apart. It is shown that in German and Japanese, syntactic structure primarily influences prosodic phrasing, which we assume to be recursive. Information structure, on the other hand, influences tonal structure, keeping phrasing intact. In a comparison between the two languages, it becomes apparent that prosodic domains corresponding to focus and givenness domains are subject to tonal readjustments. A further point made in the chapter is that the amount of downstep and reset of register domains is language‐dependent.