| This dissertation investigates the phonetics and phonology of contrastive focus (CF) in Standard Chinese, a mechanism employed to make corrections or signal a contrast. I compare changes in two acoustic parameters, duration and fundamental frequency, under CF.; It is shown that the signalling of contrastive focus involves increased prominence which is realized with a set of universally available phonetic properties. The language specific instantiation of these properties is mediated by a variety of linguistic considerations such as use of duration and fundamental frequency to signal lexical contrasts, structural effects such as boundaries of linguistic units, and more general prosodically driven differences in articulatory effort. These influences taken together reveal a rich interplay between phonetic, phonological, and morphosyntactic factors in the realization of a pragmatically important function. |
