The Way To Realize The Rhythm Of The Focal Point In Different Communicative Environments

Intonation is a hot topic in linguistics.Studying the intonation from the communicative functions can reveal the underlying mechanism of tone.Focus is one of the most important communicative functions.Cross-language comparison of focus reveals two different modes:Some languages have the characteristic of"post-focus compression(PFC)".That is,the pitch of the post-focus words decreases,the range is compressed,and the energy is reduced,such as Chinese Mandarin and languages in Altaic and Indo-European;some languages have no such feature,such as the languages in Austro-Asiatic,Tai-Kadai and Miao-Yao,and the Chinese dialects such as Min nan and Cantonese.Xu et al.(2011)proposed that"post-focus compression"’may be the inherit feature of language,this hypothesis requires more researches.This article compares the Jing and Mongolian,which belonging to the Austroasiatic and Altaic.Although both languages have deep and long-term historical contact with Chinese,and the native speakers of both languages are proficient in using Mandarin,according to the"post-focus compression inheritance",the Jing should have no PFC,and Mongolian should have this feature.This article conducted an experiment on this issue.The second question is that whether the realization of the focus in intonation is implemented in a stable manner,and whether the communicative environments will change the way the focus encoded.This article studies three external communicative environments:more emphasis(the listener did not hear the request clearly,speaker repeats it again),noise(babble noise)and long distance(imaging the listener in another room).In these environments,speakers need to increase pitch and volume,does this will affect the way the focus is implemented?In addition,in order to study the influence of internal factors on the realization of focus,the experiment added the interrogative sentences in Mongolian,which also needs to increase the pitch.The experiment uses two different paradigms:question-and-answer(Jing)and self-answer(Mongolian)to elicit the focus tones.Through the strictly controlled experimental design,four focus conditions(neutral,initial,middle,final focus)are naturally elicited.The Mongolian have two sentence patterns:declarative sentences and interrogative sentences.In noisy environment,the listeners will wear headphones,and the babble noise is played in it.The long-distance condition is controlled by letting the speaker imaging the listeners in another room.More emphasis is achieved by saying“I didn’t hear clearly,please say it again" after the speaker’s answer.After systematic acoustic analysis and statistical testing,the main conclusions are as follows:(1)In Jing,The focus word has no pitch increasing and range expansion.The pitch remains basically unchanged before the focus.There is no obvious pitch dropping and range compression after the focus.That is,there is no"post-focus compression".And in more emphasis and noise,the way the focus is implemented in intonation does not change.(2)In Mongolian,the focus word has pitch increasing and range expansion,the pitch remains unchanged before the focus.There is an obvious pitch dropping and range compression after the focus.That is,there is,”post-focus compression,’.And in the noisy and long-distance environments,the implementation of the focus do not change.Compared with the declarative sentence,the focus in the interrogative sentence is implemented in a slightly different way,and there is no"post-focus compression",which is related to the rise of the ending tone.In generally,the"post-focus compression inheritance"has been further supported.The result of Jing is similar with the languages in southern China,such as Min nan,Deang,Wa,Yi,Qiang,Miao and Yao,which all have not the feature of"post-focus compression".It can be seen that the feature of"post-focus compression’is not easily propagated through language contact.Mongolian is similar with languages in Altaic,such as Uyghur,Kazakh,and Turkish,which has the feature.In addition,the encoding of the focus in the intonation is a relatively stable linguistic feature,which will not change due to changes in tone and communicative environments.