Prosodic focus with post-focus compression: Single or Multiple Origin?
Yi Xu 1, Szu-wei Chen 2, Bei Wang 3
1
Department of Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences, University College London, UK
2
Graduate Institute of Linguistic, National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan
3
Institute of Chinese Minority Languages, Minzu University of China, China
[email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
Abstract
Recent research has discovered that the phonetic realization of
prosodic focus is diametrically different in Mandarin and
Taiwanese. In Mandarin focus is realized mainly through a trizone control of pitch range and intensity, which is similar to
many European languages, whereas in Taiwanese there is a
lack of post-focus compression of pitch range and intensity
(PFC). More interestingly, lack of PFC is also found in
Taiwan Mandarin and in Cantonese. Based on these findings
as well as findings about the distribution of PFC in other
languages, we explore in this paper the possibility that there is
a single origin of focus with PFC, and that most languages that
have it acquired it through contact with a language already
having it. The testing of this single origin hypothesis may help
to highlight language contact as a major mechanism of
language change that has been underrated.
1. Introduction
Imagine two treasure hunters, one speaking English and one
speaking Mandarin, arguing over who is the first to discover
the shining gold bracelet:
English:
It’s me who first found it!
Mandarin:
是我先发现的! (Shì wŏ xiān fāxiàn de)
Both of them were trying to emphasize that they were the first
to make the discovery, and both made the emphasis by using a
morpho-syntactic means known as clefting, which is common
to both languages. Such an emphasis is known as focus, which
serves to highlight a particular part of an utterance against the
rest of components [Bolinger, 1972; Xu, 2005]. Focus can be
also made by prosodic means, either alone as in “I found it
first!”, “我 先发现的!”, where the word in italic is in focus, or
together with clefting or other morpho-syntactic means. The
present paper is concerned mainly with the prosodic
realization of focus, its phonetic marking, its distribution
among the world languages and its historical origin.
2. Phonetic encoding of focus
Despite much research on the prosodic realization of focus in
various languages, controversies abound in the understanding
of focus. This is reflected in the key issues regarding the
nature of focus, in particular, whether focus is a holistic
function itself or is decomposable into more basic functions
which each have their own meanings.
2.1. Focus versus prominence
It is widely reported that when a component is focused, it is
spoken with raised F0, lengthened duration, increased intensity
and upper spectral energy [Xu, 2005]. It has therefore often
been taken for granted that focus is encoded through a more
basic perceptual measurement known as prominence, and that
prominence is marked only by the acoustic patterns of the
prominent items themselves. Many studies have been devoted
to searching for the basic prominence lending cues that are
independent of focus [Gussenhoven et al., 1997; Hermes &
Rump, 1994; Kochanski et al., 2005; Rietveld &
Gussenhoven, 1985; Rump & Hermes, 1996; Terken, 1991],
but few systematic conclusions have been reached. The most
extreme was the conclusion of Kochanski et al. [2005] which
is highlighted by the title of their paper: “Loudness predicts
prominence: Fundamental frequency lends little.”
That lack of success in identifying prominence cues is
recognized by two authors who have devoted much of their
research to the topic: “… it appears that real progress can be
made only if we relate potential theoretical distinctions to their
function in the processing of spoken language, i.e., if we look
at the way listeners might exploit variation in accent strength
to process and interpret spoken messages.” (our emphasis)
[Terken & Hermes, 2000:123]. Note that if prominence itself
cannot be adequately defined independently of “spoken
messages”, explaining focus encoding in terms of prominence
is susceptible to circularity.
But if the acoustic correlates of prominence turns out to be
elusive, and especially if we have to resort to linguistic
functions to find them, do we still want to insist that listeners
process word stress and focus through prominence as opposed
to directly through their own acoustic correlates?
2.2. Focus versus pitch accent
Closely related to the notion of prominence is the notion of
pitch accent. As defined by Ladd [2008:48]: “A pitch accent
may be defined as a local feature of a pitch contour — usually,
but not invariably a pitch change, and often involving a local
minimum or maximum — which signals that the syllable with
which it is associated is prominent in the utterance.” Although
intonational phonology recognizes a link between focus and
pitch accent, it assumes that pitch accent is the phonological
unit while focus just makes a pragmatic usage of the
phonological device. It is further assumed that pitch accents
directly carries meaning, as demonstrated by an elaborate
effort to identify the meanings of different intonational
components, including pitch accents [Pierrehumbert &
Hirschberg, 1990].
It is also recognized that components other than the
focused item often lose their accents, or are “deaccented”.
Such deaccenting is often treated as a separate phonological
device related but not essential to focus. Ladd [2008]
summarized the languages that have deaccenting and those
that do not, based on his own and other researchers’
observations. However, except for Swert et al. [2002], none of
the reports was based on experimental data.
There has also been report of another process known as
dephrasing as a means to realize focus, which is said to apply
in languages like Japanese and Korean [Jun, 1993; Oh, 2001].
Dephrasing refers to the loss of accentual phrase boundaries
either before and/or after focus [Ladd, 2008]. As will be seen
later, however, at least in the case of Korean, there is little
acoustic evidence for dephrasing when focus is studied with
systematically controlled materials.
Overall, an essential question is whether focus is encoded
directly or mediated by processes such as prominence
formation, accenting, deaccenting or dephrasing. The key for
settling this question is to determine whether these processes
can be operationally independent of focus. As far as we know,
this has never been explicitly demonstrated. Another way to
answer this question is to find out experimentally how focus is
realized in speech production and perception when it is
directly controlled as a communicative function.
2.3. Tri-zone focus encoding and post-focus compression
(PFC)
To understand the phonetic realization of any linguistic
function, it is important to first take into consideration its
likely temporal domain of operation. For a word to be
recognized in isolation, for example, it must be the case that
the acoustic properties within its own temporal interval
provide sufficient information about its identity, i.e., its
constituent vowels and consonants are readily recognizable. In
contrast, for a word to stand out as being focused, the domain
of operation should preferably include not only the focused
item, but also the surrounding items. This likely preference
cannot be confirmed or rejected unless both the focused and
surrounding components are examined at the same time. For
English, this is done in Cooper et al. [1985], Eady & Cooper
[1986] and Xu & Xu [2005]. For Mandarin, this is done in Xu
[1999] and Chen et al. [2009]. The common features found in
these studies are as follows.
Common features of focus:
1.
On-focus: Expanded pitch range, increased duration
2.
Post-focus: lowered and compressed pitch range
3.
Pre-focus: No consistent change of pitch range or
duration
Of these features, 1) has been widely noted, but 2) and 3) are
noted only occasionally. In particular, the importance of postfocus pitch range has rarely been noticed. But its critical role
in perception is reflected in the findings of Rump and Collier
[1996] for Dutch and Mixdorff [2004] for Finnish. For both
languages, the perception of an early focus requires that the F0
of the later peak is well below that of the neutral-focus
sentence. Although the same perception experiments have not
been done for Mandarin, English or other languages where
post-focus pitch range compression is reported, it would not be
surprising if similar perceptual patterns are found in the these
languages.
3. Independence of PFC and other linguistic
features
That focus can be realized prosodically in a language like
Mandarin is quite interesting. Mandarin is a full-fledged tonal
language in which every syllable carries a lexical tone which
is encoded mainly by a pitch pattern [Chao; Chen & Xu, 2006;
Xu 1997]. Thus the use of pitch for making lexical contrast
does not preclude its use for encoding focus. Mandarin also
uses clefting to mark focus just like in English, as seen in the
example given at the beginning of this paper. Therefore, the
existence of a morpho-syntactic means to indicate focus also
does not preclude prosodic focus in the same language. PFC
seems to be independent of both the tonal and syntactic
characteristics of a language.
The independence of focus and tone is more clearly seen
in a surprising new finding that PFC is absent in Taiwanese, a
tone language closely related to Mandarin [Chen et al., 2009;
Pan, 2007]. More unexpectedly, the same study further found
that PFC is also absent in Taiwan Mandarin, an official
language spoken in Taiwan which closely resembles Beijing
Mandarin in many aspects. Figure 1 displays time-normalized
mean F0 contours by speakers of Beijing Mandarin, Taiwanese
and Taiwan Mandarin, as reported in Chen et al., 2009.
Displayed in Figure 1 are time-normalized mean F0
contours of the sentence 媽媽摸貓咪 “Mommy strokes kitty”
spoken with focus on the first, second, third word or none of
the words. In Figure 1a, we can see that F0 of the focused word
is higher than that of neutral focus sentence, especially in the
cases of initial and medial focus. We can also see that postfocus F0 is substantially lower than that of the neutral focus
sentence. Finally, the F0 of pre-focus words deviate little from
that of neutral focus sentence. In contrast, in Figure 1b and 1c
the mean F0 contours of Taiwanese produced by both
monolingual and bilingual speakers show very little difference
across the four focus conditions. Larger differences can be
seen in the F0 contours of Taiwan Mandarin speakers,
especially those by monolingual speakers (Figs. 1d, 1e).
However, in all these cases post-focus F0 in initial and medial
focus sentences does not go below the F0 of the corresponding
words in the no focus condition.
The study further shows, with systematic acoustic analyses,
that in Beijing Mandarin, F0 and intensity of post-focus words
are substantially lowered, while in Taiwanese and Taiwan
Mandarin, spoken by both monolingual and bilingual speakers,
such post-focus compression is entirely absent. At the same
time, all the speakers increased F0, intensity and duration of
on-focus words. There is virtually no reduction of the duration
of the post-focus words, and in fact post-focus duration is
increased in Taiwanese by both monolingual and bilingual
speakers, and in Taiwan Mandarin by bilingual speakers. Thus
they increased the duration of all syllables whenever there is a
focus anywhere in the sentence, which does not seem to be an
effective way of encoding focus, judging from the perception
results.
Chen et al. [2009] have further shown the perceptual
importance of post-focus compression. The presence of such
compression in initial and medial focus in Beijing Mandarin,
as seen in Figure 1a, lead to over 90% focus recognition,
whereas the lack of it in final focus in Beijing Mandarin and in
all types of focus in Taiwanese and Taiwan Mandarin lead to
less than 75% of focus recognition. This suggests that the lack
of PFC is not beneficial as far as effective prosodic encoding
of focus is concerned.
The findings of Chen et al. [2009] thus demonstrate that
even closely related languages can have rather different ways
of realizing focus. Such difference is independent of whether
the language is tonal, since Taiwanese, Taiwan Mandarin and
Beijing Mandarin are all tonal, or whether there are
morphosyntactic means to indicate focus, since they exist in
both Mandarin and Taiwanese. The case of Taiwan Mandarin
is especially intriguing, as it is phonetically very similar to
Beijing Mandarin, and yet its focus realization is more similar
to Taiwanese. Just as interestingly, there is recent evidence
that PFC is also absent in Cantonese, another southern Chinese
language [Gu & Lee, 2007; Wu & Xu, 2010] , Deang (王玲等,
ms; 尹巧云等, ms) and Yi (王蓓等, ms.), all spoken in south
China.
a)
b)
c)
d)
e)
Figure 1: Time-normalized mean F0 contours
produced by 4 speaker groups. Each curve is an
average of 40 repetitions by 8 speakers. The vertical
lines indicate syllable boundaries. The solid thin
curves are from the no-focus condition.
4. Origin of PFC
As is known, Taiwan Mandarin is a variant of Mandarin
spoken in Taiwan. Although once homogeneous with Standard
Chinese, at least by definition, it now has noticeable
differences in vocabulary, grammar [Cheng, 1985] and
pronunciation [Fon et al., 2004] from its mainland counterpart.
Mandarin was strongly promoted by the Nationalist
government until the 1980s, and it remains dominant in
Taiwan. However, with the largest ethnic group Hoklo,
Taiwanese was also spoken widely at home and among
friends. Today, most people in Taiwan are bilinguals, fluent in
both Taiwanese and Taiwan Mandarin. Over the years, Taiwan
Mandarin has acquired many Taiwanese features in both
syntax [Cheng, 1985] and phonology [Zheng, 1999]. The
findings of Chen et al. [2009] suggest that Taiwan Mandarin
has lost PFC due to its close contact with Taiwanese through
pervasive bilingualism in Taiwan over several generations.
Given the fact that Taiwan Mandarin apparently has lost
PFC through close contact with Taiwanese over several
generations, a natural question arises: how did PFC get into
Mandarin in the first place? There are two apparent
possibilities: (a) it emerged locally in the language, and (b) it
entered there through language contact, just as it got lost in
Taiwan Mandarin through language contact. The fact that PFC
did not arise automatically in Taiwanese and Cantonese at
least suggests that PFC may not easily emerge in a language.
If, on the other hand, we take possibility (b) seriously, a
further question would then arise: From what language or
historical process did Mandarin acquire PFC?
Historically, Northern China was in close contact with
many non-Chinese speaking populations, in particular,
Mongolian and Manchurian, who ruled China during the Yuan
(1271-1368 AD) and Qing dynasties (1644-1912 AD). The
most intense contacts probably happened during the many
population movements, some of them of very large scale
[LaPolla, 2001]. As the result of such contacts, there has been
much influence of those languages on Mandarin [Chappell,
2001; LaPolla, 2001; Wadley, 1996]. There are also more
recent speculations that non-Chinese influence on northern
Chinese was actually much earlier than Yuan and Qing
dynasties [ 朱 学 渊 , 2008]. Notably, both Mongolian and
Manchurian are Altaic, a hypothetic language family that
includes at least the Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic languages
[Georg et al., 1999]. Some Altaic proponents would also
include Korean and Japanese into this family [Georg et al.,
1999]. Interestingly, there is evidence that both Japanese and
Korean also have PFC [Ishihara, 2002; Lee & Xu, 2010].
There thus seem to be several intriguing possibilities: A)
PFC originated from Altaic languages and then spread,
through language contact, to Mandarin, and, in a similar
manner, to European languages; B) PFC originated from the
time of intense contact and mixing between the Altaic and
northern Chinese languages and then spread both to many of
the northern Chinese dialects and to the European languages;
and C) PFC originated from Indo-European languages and
spread first to Altaic languages and then to Northern Chinese.
We may call possibility A) the Altaic Origin of PFC
hypothesis (AO-PFC), possibility B) the Northern China
Origin of PFC hypothesis (NC-PFC) and possibility C) the
Indo-European Origin of PFC hypothesis (IO-PFC). Or, we
may refer to all three as the Single Origin of Focus-Focus
Compression hypothesis (SO-PFC).
5. Testing the Single Origin hypothesis
Admittedly, all the hypotheses just mentioned seem outlandish
or even laughable. But they are not implausible. Importantly,
they are testable, i.e., for any of them to be true, the following
predictions, listed in the order of obligatoriness, also need to
be true:
1)
PFC exists in no languages that have never been in close
contact with Altaic, Indo-European or northern Chinese
languages;
2)
PFC exists in all Altaic languages;
3)
PFC exists in most northern Chinese dialects but in few
or no southern dialects/languages;
shown in the table is whether the findings were based on
statistical and/or graphic comparisons of post-focus F0. As can
be seen, although much uncertainty remains in the case of
many languages due to methodological inadequacies, so far
there is no contradiction to SO-PFC. The list in Table 1 is of
course still way too short to constitute definitive support SOPFC, but it can serve as an encouraging starting point.
4)
PFC exists in most or all Indo-European languages.
5.2. Implications
Interestingly, based on our literature survey so far, as will be
discussed in the next section, there has not been direct
counterevidence to these hypotheses.
SO-PFC is worth testing for several reasons. First, previous
research seems to favor the view that every language has a
unique but constantly changing prosodic system. SO-PFC, in
contrast, suggests that prosodic features are more stable than
previously thought and may remain in a language for a long
time except when disrupted by external influences due to
language contact. Secondly, most linguistic typological
patterns, such as word order and tonality, are found across
5.1. Languages with and without PFC
Table 1 shows a list of languages that have been investigated
for phonetic marking of focus, and shows for each of them
whether PFC exists and whether SO-PFC is supported. Also
Table 1. Languages with and without PFC.
Support
PFC? SO-PFC?
Statistical comparison of
post-focal & neutral f0?
Graphical minimal
pair comparisons?
Language family
Language
Altaic
Japanese
+
√
Korean
+
√
√
√
Lee & Xu 2010
Uyghur
+
√
√
√
卡扎尔，王蓓， ms.
American Indian
Yucatec Maya
–
√
Kügler & Skopeteas 2007
Bantu
Chichewa
–
√
Downing 2008
Chitumbuka
–
√
Downing 2008
Durban Zulu
–
√
Downing 2008
Chadic
Hausa
–
√
Hartmann & Zimmermann, 2007
Chinese (?)
Taiwan Mandarin
–
√
√
√
Chen, Wang & Xu 2009
Chinese (North)
Beijing Mandarin
+
√
√
√
Xu 1999
Chinese (South)
Cantonese
–
√
√
Cantonese
–
√
√
√
Wu & Xu 2010
Taiwanese
–
√
√
√
Chen, Wang & Xu 2009
Yi
–
√
√
√
取比尔莲, 王蓓, ms
Deang
–
√
√
√
王玲等, ms; 尹巧云等, ms
English
+
√
√
√
Xu & Xu 2005
French
+
√
German
+
√
√
√
Italian
?
?
Swerts et al. 2002
Neapolitan Italian
+
√
D'Imperio 2001
Romanian
?
?
Ladd 2008
Hindi
+
√
Patil et al., 2008
Persian
+
√
Sadat-Tehrani, 2008
Buli
–
√
Schwarz 2009
Northern Sotho
–
√
Wolof
–
√
Egyptian Arabic
+
√
Lebanese Arabic
+
√
European
Indo-Iranian
Niger-Congo
Semitic
Source
Ishihara 2002
Gu & Lee 2007
Dohen & Lœvenbruck 2004
√
Féry & Kügler 2008; Wang 2008
Zerbian, 2006
Rialland & Robert 2001
√
Hellmuth 2006
Chahal 2001
languages that are not closely related [Haspelmath et al.,
2005], suggesting multiple emergences of similar patterns. But
a few typological features, such as phonemic clicks in
southern and eastern Africa [Haspelmath et al., 2005], and lax
prosody in question intonation [Rialland, 2009], do seem to
occur only in genetically or geographically related languages.
SO-PFC, if supported, would group PFC with clicks and lax
prosody as one of the hard-to-emerge features. Most
importantly, testing SO-PFC can examine contact as a major
mechanism of language change from a unique angle.
In biological evolution, once speciation occurs, it is
generally impossible for two species to evolve further through
cross breeding. In language evolution, in contrast, no matter
how different two languages have become, they can always
reunite when the host populations merge. After the population
merger, often only one language is left many generations later.
At that point an important question is then, what exactly is the
surviving language like, one of the original languages, or a
language with characteristics of both original languages?
However, such a question is at best considered to be marginal
among mainstream linguistic theories. Even in the recently
emerged evolutionary phonology, language contact is
considered only as one of the “unnatural factors” [Blevins,
2004]. Given the frequent population movements as
mentioned earlier at least in the case of northern China, such
unnatural factors probably deserve much more attention than
have been given, as their effects are conceivably much more
disruptive and comprehensive than the more natural
mechanisms that have been considered before. SO-PFC, if
supported, may be the first phonetic feature that will be found
to have spread across many languages and language families,
which will clearly highlight the importance of language
contact as one of the core mechanisms of language change.
[5]
[6]
[7]
[8]
[9]
[10]
[11]
[12]
[13]
[14]
6. Conclusion
We have argued in this paper that, first, focus is a
communicative function that is directly encoded with patterns
of pitch range manipulation and intensity and duration
controls, rather than being mediated by abstract elements such
prominence or pitch accent. Second, the most effective
component of focus encoding in languages like English and
Mandarin is PFC — post-focus compression of pitch range
and intensity. Third, despite its pervasive presence in
European and Altaic languages and in Beijing Mandarin, PFC
is non-universal as it is absent in many languages, including
Taiwanese, Cantonese and even Taiwan Mandarin. Based on
the finding of the non-universality of PFC and especially the
fact that Taiwan Mandarin has lost PFC due to close contact
with Taiwanese, we proposed that PFC may have a single
origin, which could be Altaic, European or even in Northern
China. We propose further that there is a need to conduct a
large-scale cross-linguistic investigation of PFC based on
systematically controlled experimentation.
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