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Duration as a focus-marking device in Cantonese

Pitch register is found to be the major prosodic device for marking focus in tone languages like Mandarin, with on-focal boosting and post-focal compression. However, both are limited or even missing in Cantonese, leading to the claim that Cantonese does not rely on prosodic cues to mark focus and prefers morphosyntactic means. The current study reveals how duration, another prosodic parameter, is systematically manipulated under focus, and interacts with lexical tones and syntactic markers. The results show that: (1) both on-focal lengthening and post-focal duration compression are present; (2) the presence of syntactic markers further increases the on-focal lengthening due to its strong pragmatic meaning, yet cancels out the post-focal compression; (3) checked tones resist lengthening, but the duration of preceding syllable increases as a compensation. We concluded that Cantonese uses different prosodic marking device compared to Mandarin, which is related to their differences in word prosody.