Interactive Prosodic Marking of Focus, Boundary and Newness in Mandarin

Wang, Bei; Xu, Yi; Ding, Qifan

doi:10.1159/000453082

Cited by 26 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 94 publications

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“…They argued that focus assignment does not change the way prosodic phrases are formed in dual-focus sentences. This is consistent with the findings of Wang, Xu and Ding (2018) that single-focus realization is independent of phrasal marking, that is, that a single focus does not necessarily create a prosodic boundary after the focus (see also Chen, 2004).…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 89%

Prosody of Dual-focus in German: Interaction between Focus and Phrasing

Wang

Féry

2017

Lang Speech

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This paper studies the prosodic realization of dual-focus in German, that is, two foci in a single sentence, with special consideration of the interaction between focus assignment and phrasing. In a production experiment, dual-focus was compared with its initial, final, and all-new counterparts in sentences with subject NPs and VPs of different lengths. The results showed that there were three different patterns of dual-focus realization: (1) The most frequent one was the two-peak pattern (57.8%), that is, a falling tone on both focused words and compressed and lowered pitch in-between; (2) the second most frequent was the two-phrase realization (23.5%), in which both foci were also realized as a falling tone, but in this case, a high boundary tone was inserted after the subject NP; (3) the least frequent pattern was the hat-pattern (18.7%), consisting of a rising tone on the first focus and a falling tone on the second one while the pitch in-between is kept as a high plateau. This was applied mostly in utterances containing a short subject NP. We interpret these results in terms of optional prosodic phrasing. A sentence with two foci can be realized in one or two intonation phrases, but in both cases, the focus is assigned within the prosodic domain derived from syntax. These results show that Culminativity, the principle requiring a one-to-one correspondence between prosodic domains and their heads, is violable in German. Two equally prominent pitch accents are allowed to co-exist in one intonation phrase. Finally, the metrical structure of dual-focus speaks for a recursive structure of German prosody.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 89%

Prosody of Dual-focus in German: Interaction between Focus and Phrasing

Wang

Féry

2017

Lang Speech

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“…Xu, 2004; in some cases the syntactically marked focus can even be prosodically non-prominent). Indeed, while in Germanic, Romance and Hungarian PFM is phonological, in Mandarin it has been argued to be merely phonetic in nature (Wang, Xu & Ding, 2017;Yang & Chen, 2018). Arguably, this lack of uniformity in PFM makes prosodic prominence-marking a highly unreliable cue of focus in the acquisition process.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children's comprehension of prosodically marked focus in Hungarian: How mandatory syntactic focus-marking affects the trajectory of acquisition

Surányi

Pintér

2021

J. Child Lang.

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This study investigates children's identification of prosodic focus in Hungarian, a language in which syntactic focus-marking is mandatory. Assuming that regular syntactic focus-marking diminishes the disambiguating role of prosodic marking in acquisition, we expected that in sentences in which focus is only disambiguated by prosody, adult-like comprehension of prosodic focus-marking should be delayed in comparison to the Germanic and Romance languages investigated previously using the same experimental method that we adopted. Our results, confirming this prediction, suggest that the developmental trajectory of the comprehension of prosodic focus-marking may be substantially affected by cross-linguistic grammatical variation in the marking of focus.

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“…and peak x ( ) denote the peak set of x (to get peak x ( ), see [28]). (ii) If i j x , ⊂ + then s s s…”

Section: Proposed Methods For Determining Pms and Qta Representationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tonal languages speech synthesis using an indirect pitch markers and the quantitative target approximation methods

Thai

Huy

Tuyet

et al. 2019

Journal of the Belarusian State University. Mathematics and Informatics

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Synthesizing tones plays an important role in text-to-speech systems of tonal languages. To accomplish this, the two important steps are to determine the pitch markers of voice utterances and synthesize F0 trajectories for lexical tones. In this paper, we propose two efficient algorithms, one of them is to locate the pitch markers at the peaks of the cumulative signal of each voiced part of the input utterance and the other is to generate F0 trajectories of tones with quantitative target approximation (qTA) parameters of Xu model. The experimentation has shown that the proposed algorithms present pitch markers with high accuracy which has enabled us to generate tones with complex shapes.

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Interactive Prosodic Marking of Focus, Boundary and Newness in Mandarin

Cited by 26 publications

References 94 publications

Prosody of Dual-focus in German: Interaction between Focus and Phrasing

Prosody of Dual-focus in German: Interaction between Focus and Phrasing

Children's comprehension of prosodically marked focus in Hungarian: How mandatory syntactic focus-marking affects the trajectory of acquisition

Tonal languages speech synthesis using an indirect pitch markers and the quantitative target approximation methods

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