Focus prosody in Cantonese and Teochew noun phrases

Abstract

We report production data on the prosodic realization of two types of foci (constituent wh-answers, and constituent correction) of two Chinese languages that are very different from Mandarin: Hong Kong Cantonese and Teochew (a variety of Southern Min dialect spoken in Jieyang, Guangdong China). The results indicated that unlike what was reported about focus prosody at the sentential level in Cantonese, on-focus lengthening was observed with wh focus data but nothing about on-focus intensity. F0 cues were not obvious but some tendency of post-focal compression was found in F0 velocity. The Teochew data instead showed no significant acoustic distinction across different types of information structure.