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Post-focus pitch register lowering as a phrasal marker - An acoustic study of focus and phrasing in Shanghai Chinese

This paper reports an experiment designed to investigate whether post-focus tonal realization is constrained by prosodic structure in Shanghai Chinese (SH). Previous studies have shown that in SH, focus expanded the f0 range of bi-syllabic tone sandhi words while pitch register lowering, instead of pitch range compression, was consistently found on post-focus bi-syllabic tone sandhi words. The present study examined durational adjustments and f0 realizations of bi-syllabic tone sandhi words at different prosodic levels under different focus conditions. The results showed that focus expanded the pitch range of the target syllables at both the levels of Prosodic Word and Major Word, but postfocus pitch register lowering was only found at the level of Major Word. Based on the results, this study concludes that post-focus tonal realization in SH is constrained by prosodic structure and post-focus pitch register lowering is a phrasal marker.