The effect of focus on lexical tones in Vietnamese
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2008/02/0029/000088Keywords:
lexical tone, Vietnamese, focus, intonationAbstract
We investigated the effect of focus on the formation of f0 in two of the six tones of the Hà Nội dialect of Vietnamese. This dialect contrasts six lexical tones, has no tone-sandhi, the language does not have focus markers and uses prosody exclusively to express pragmatic contrasts (Jannedy, 2007) by means of intonational emphasis in ways similar to English or German. To tease out the effect of focus on the duration and f0 of the level tone ngang and the rising tone sắc, identical short SVO-type utterances were elicited with a question-answer paradigm under three focus conditions (subject-, verb-, and object focus). Results indicate that the tone especially under subject- and verb- but also object focus shows an f0-excursion for the ngang tone and a scoop and sharp rise for sắc. Duration of the focused syllable also increases.
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Copyright (c) 2008 Stefanie Jannedy (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
