No prosody-syntax trade-offs: Prosody marks focus in Mandarin cleft constructions

Abstract

In line with the idea that language has evolved to be efficient and to avoid redundancy, syntactic means of marking information structure have been derived from prosodic ones, and vice versa, for many languages. On the basis of crosslinguistic comparisons, prosody-syntax trade-offs have frequently been described for clefts. The present study investigated whether such trade-offs can also be observed language-internally, testing whether clefting reduced prosodic focus marking in production or its effects on perception in Mandarin. A production study found that clefts showed prosodic focus marking equal to or exceeding that found in syntactically unmarked equivalents. In both syntactic conditions, focused constituents had larger f0 ranges, higher f0 maxima and longer durations compared to a broad focus baseline, while post-focal constituents showed lower f0 maxima and minima, lower intensity and, for clefts, shorter durations (28 participants, 937 utterances containing 4466 syllables analyzed in total). A rating study likewise found that the effect of prosody on the perception of information structure was not modulated by clefting, which neither affected ratings nor reaction times (102 participants, 2448 responses analyzed in total). These findings suggest that prosody is integral for marking focus in cleft constructions instead of constituting a redundant cue.