Handout #15FocusFocus• In semantics and pragmatics, there is a rich bodyof work on what focus means.• When someone refers to focus in phonetic work,they mean a discourse-prominent item.• A word or syllable can be rendered prominent justby being in a prominent, i.e. stressed, position.• But focus is meaningful prominence - somethingbeing made prominent to draw the listener’sattention to it.Focus• Focus is elicited by providing a mini-discourse context in which attention isfocused on one item in the sentence.• Question-Answer pairs– A: What about Anna? Who did she come with?– B: Anna came with MANNY.Focus• Contradiction– A: Anna came with George.– B: No, Anna came with MANNY.• New item vs. previously mentioned– A: George came to the party with Archibald.Fred came with Sally. Anna came. too.– B: Anna came with MANNY.Focus• It is not clear that all these differentcontexts are the same in terms of discoursestructure or phonetic effect.• When we talk about the effect of focus in acontrolled experiment, we’re really talkingabout the effect of the specific contextpreceding the utterance.Fry (1958)• Fry (1958) manipulated intensity, f0 and durationin stress minimal pairs in English such as prótest(noun) and protést (verb).• He had listeners identify which word they heard.• He found that the word was more likely to beidentified as the noun if it had higher f0 andgreater duration on the first syllable.• Of the two, he found that f0 had the strongerperceptual effect.Fry (1958)• One problem was that the words were presented inisolation.• An isolated word is always focused, phrase-finaland phrase-initial.• As Pierrehumbert (1980) pointed out, the stressedsyllable of a word is by no means higher in f0 thanother syllables, if intonation is controlled.• An isolated focused item will usually attract a H*pitch accent, rather than some other pitch accent.Stress• Stress has come to be the term for structuralprominence, such as prominence ofsyllables within a word, or prominence byvirtue of position.• A stressed syllable has greater duration andgreater intensity than a correspondingunstressed syllable.Accent• An accented syllable is one with a pitch accent(T*), i.e. an intonational prominence-markingtone.• An accented syllable has greater stress than anunaccented syllable, so it is longer and moreintense.• It also has the f0 contour that realizes its pitchaccent T*.Bruce (1977)• A focused item has a word-final f0 peakthat is lacking in a corresponding non-focused item.• Bruce interpreted this peak as being due toan intonational high tone.• This high tone is a morpheme markingfocus.Hyperarticulation• De Jong (1995), in an x-ray study, foundthat the main-stressed syllable in a focuseditem was more hyperarticulated than in non-focused items, i.e. front vowels werefronter, back vowels backer, low vowelslower.The effect on f0• F0 is likewise more hyperarticulated infocused items compared to nonfocused:high tones are realized with higher f0 andlow tones with lower f0.• Thus the f0 range is expanded in bothdirections in focused items:– Japanese (Pierrehumbert and Beckman 1988)– Mandarin (Shih 1988, Xu 1999)The effect on f0• Pitch range is often reduced in the intervalfrom the focused item to the end of thephrase:– Mandarin (Xu 1999: 95)– Greek (Baltazani and Jun 1999)– French (Di Cristo and Jankowski 1999)Sluijters and van Heuven (1996,1997)• Sluijters and van Heuven (1996) found thatintensity in higher frequency range was astrong correlate of stress.• Speaking louder affects the ratio of closedto open in the glottal cycle, and so affectsspectral tilt (Monsen and Engebretsen1977).References• Baltazani, M. and S. Jun (1999). Focus and topic intonation in Greek.In J. Ohala, Y. Hasegawa, M. Ohala, D. Granville and A. Bailey (eds.),Proceedings of the XIVth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences.Linguistics Department, University of California: Berkeley. 1305-1308.• Bruce, G. (1977). Swedish Word Accents in Sentence Perspective.Travaux de l'Institut de Linguistique de Lund 12. Lund: CWKGleerup.• Di Cristo, A. and Jankowski, L. (1999). Prosodic organization andphrasing after focus in French. In J. Ohala, Y. Hasegawa, M. Ohala, D.Granville and A. Bailey (eds.), Proceedings of the XIVth InternationalCongress of Phonetic Sciences, Linguistics Department, University ofCalifornia: Berkeley. 1565-1568.• Fry, D. (1958) Experiments in the Perception of Stress. Language andSpeech 1, 120-152.References• Liberman, M. and J. Pierrehumbert (1984). Intonational InvarianceUnder Changes in Pitch Range and Length. In M. Aronoff and R.Oehrle (eds.) Language Sound Structure. MIT Press, Cambridge. 157-233.• Monsen, R. and A. M. Engebretsen (1977). Study in variations in themale and female glottal wave. JASA 62. 981-993.• Pierrehumbert, J. (1980) The Phonetics and Phonology of EnglishIntonation, Indiana University Linguistics Club, Bloomington.• Pierrehumbert, J. and M. Beckman (1988). Japanese Tone Structure.MIT Press, Cambridge.• Shih, C.(1988). Tone and Intonation in Mandarin. Working Papers ofthe Cornell Phonetics Laboratory 3, 83-109.• Sluijter, A. and V. van Heuven (1996). Spectral balance as an acousticcorrelate of linguistic stress. JASA 100. 2471-2485.• Xu, Y. (1999). Effects of tone and focus on the formation andalignment of f0 contours. Journal of Phonetics 27,