The Syntactic Structure Defines The Focus Range

The paper compared prosodic realization of single focus and dual focus,with a special concern on how syntactic structure blocked the domain of post-focus-compression(PFC).We further used the scope of PFC as a cue to systematically investigate the syntax-prosody interface and how focus structure interacted with prosodic structure.The first experiment studied how syntactic boundaries blocked the domain of single and dual focus.In this experiment,focus and boundaries were two factors.A word in the middle of each target sentence was set as the target word.There were four degrees of boundaries after the target word,which were words,phrases,clauses,(?)and sentences boundaries.Different boundaries were designed by using homonyms to change syntactic structures.Besides,there were four focus conditions:neutral focus(NF),middle focus(XF),final focus(YF)and dual focus(XY).The results showed that:PFC in the single focus condition could go through boundaries between words,phrases,even clauses,but PFC in dual focus can only go through a word boundary.In other words,the domain of the first focus in a dual focus sentence was prosodic phrase,but the domain of a single focus was intonation phrase.If two clauses didn't have semantic relationship,PFC of a single focus would be blocked.That is to say,the recursion of intonation phrases would be constrained by semantic relationship.The second experiment was to investigate how syntactic relation and length of syntactic phrases affect recursion of prosodic phrases.Based on the first experiment,whether two prosodic phrases are recursive could be determined by the domain of the PFC of the first focus in a dual focus sentence.The experiment designed two kinds of sentences,which had different syntactic structures:(()?1()?2)?()?3,in which ?1 and ?2 were two related phrases and formed as a larger phrase;and()?1()?2()?3,in which ?1 and ?2 were two unrelated phrases).The foci were set in ?1 and ?3.If the PFC of the focus in ?1 could go through ?2 in both structures,it indicated that the recursion of prosodic phrases was independent of syntactic relation.If the PFC could only go through ?2 in the second structure,it indicated that syntactic relation is a factor on prosodic recursion.The length of ?3 was another factor.The results showed that the recursion of prosody phrases was independent of syntactic structure,but would be influenced by the length of syntactic phrases.In conclusion,prosodic structure was both dependent and independent of syntactic structure:the prosodic boundary was influenced by syntactic structure,but the recursion in prosody does not rely on syntactic structure.The constrains of prosodic structure on the domain of a focus are different between single and dual focus.