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Focus without Post-Focal Fall in Japanese| old_uid | 13557 |
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| title | Focus without Post-Focal Fall in Japanese |
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| start_date | 2017/03/10 |
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| schedule | 11h-12h |
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| online | no |
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| summary | It is well-known that semantic focus is phonetically realized in many languages ([1], among others). English, for example, marks contrastive focus with a bitonal pitch accent (L+H*) and carries discourse information to identify focus ([2,3]). On the other hand, in Korean, for example, focus is less acoustically marked and listeners identify the contrastive word at low accuracy rates ([1]).
This paper considers Japanese, where there are two contradictory views on its discourse information. One is that Japanese accent carries lexical information and accent is not principally used to convey discourse information ([1]). The other view is that when a sentence contains a contrastive focus, the F0-peak of the semantically focused phrase is raised ('focal F0-rise', henceforth), and the pitch contour of the post-focal material is lowered. Japanese focus is thus acoustically well marked and is predicted to be identified accurately ([4,5,6,7]).
We have conducted a perception experiment and a production experiment of contrastive focus in Japanese; Japanese has 'accented (A)' and 'unaccented (U)' words which are lexically realized at the Accentual/Minor Phrase. Our finding is that when an unaccented word and an accented word are combined to form an Intermediate/Major Phrase (MaP), i.e. [U - A]MaP, the unaccented word, even when it is focused, is lower in pitch than the accented word. We presume unaccented words prevent boosting to the level recognized as a focal phrasal H. This leads to perceptual difficulties of focus on unaccented words, and our perception experiment shows that our claim is borne out.
Our study shows that a focal F0 peak does not always coincide with phrasal H and Japanese allows post-focal materials higher in pitch than the focal F0 peak. This is, however, not the case with accented words ([7]); the F0 peak of a focused accented word is higher than those of post-focal words. They are naturally easy to perceive.
The two views on acoustic properties of Japanese focus look contradictory at first, but when we take lexical properties into consideration, they explain different aspects of focal acoustics in Japanese. |
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| responsibles | Contact |
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