A quantitative study of focus shift in Marathi

Abstract

We study the effect of focus shift on prosodic features for Marathi, a major Indian language. In our analysis, we consider different focus locations and different focus widths. We report observations of fundamental frequency, intensity, and syllabic durations of constituent words of the utterance. F0 is studied via the accent commands of the Fujisaki model. We contrast statements containing narrowly focused content words with broad focused statements. Contexts for narrowly focused items are either contrastive or non-contrastive. Our results show that narrow focus is marked by longer duration of the focused word, and a larger accent command in the focused word. Post-focal effects are observed for duration, intensity and F0. No differences were found between contrastive and non-contrastive focus.

Quantitative Analysis of Māori Prosody from Three Generations

“…In contrast, F0 contours appear to be different with respect to the phrase and accent components of the Fujisaki model. For this discussion it is in order to rather speak of global and local gestures of F0, as accent commands in Māori do not seem to be aligned with lexically stressed syllables as they are in forming pitch accents of Germanic languages, for instance, but rather indicate the onsets and offsets of prosodic groups and phrases as in Marathi [20] or Hindi [21], for instance. As indicated by the example of the word "kōrero", phrase stress seems to be marked by F0 irrespective of the lexical stress position.…”