The present study investigates the phonetic realization and phonological patterns of focal accents of disyllabic words with different inner morphosyntactic structures in standard Chinese. This was done through the study of phonetic realization of disyllabic focused words with Modifier-Head, Reduplicated and Prefix-Stem (MH, Rd, and PS hereafter, respectively) structures in short declarative sentences of Mandarin. These target sentences each consists of seven syllables with three kinds of focused words in different positions of the sentences. The sentences involved in the present study were applied with only one focus condition: narrow focus, and by one speaker. Results of acoustic and frequency analyses show that the distribution of focal accents is restricted by the inner morphosyntactic structure of the focused words; therefore, we propose the phonological patterns of disyllabic narrow focused constituents through the theoretical model of Metrical phonology (Liberman and Prince, 1977), that is, w-s relation for MH structure, s-w for Rd structure and w-s for PS structure.
Liberman, Mark and Alan Prince. 1977. On stress and linguistic rhythm. LI 8.
Cite as: Jia, Y., Xiong, Z., Li, A. (2006) Narrow focus patterns of disyllabic words with different morphosyntactic structures in standard Chinese. Proc. 2nd International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages (TAL 2006), 73-76
@inproceedings{jia06_tal,
author={Yuan Jia and Ziyu Xiong and Aijun Li},
title={{Narrow focus patterns of disyllabic words with different morphosyntactic structures in standard Chinese}},
year=2006,
booktitle={Proc. 2nd International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages (TAL 2006)},
pages={73--76}
}