Prosody and information structure in a tone language: an investigation of Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

Prosody conveys discourse-level information, but the extent to which prosodic cues distinguish different kinds of information-structural concepts remains unclear. The prosodic encoding of information structure is even more complicated in tone languages, where acoustic cues such as F0, intensity and duration also distinguish lexical items (e.g. Mandarin). Prior work on Mandarin led to divergent findings regarding whether and what prosodic cues mark the distinctions between information-structural types. We conducted a production study on Mandarin to investigate whether (1) the presence/absence of corrective focus and (2) the distinction between new/given information are encoded prosodically. Our results show that correctiveness was reflected in all three acoustic parameters: corrective words had longer durations, larger F0 ranges and larger intensity ranges than non-corrective words. The new-given distinction was reflected only in lengthening and F0 range expansion, and only in the absence of correction (correctiveness-by-givenness interaction). This suggests that new information is encoded differently from corrective focus in Mandarin: only corrective focus is associated with intensity range expansion. Our results provide further evidence for the multi-functionality of acoustic-prosodic dimensions. Even in a language with lexical tones, which differ in F0, intensity and duration, all these dimensions also encode information structure. Furthermore, not only can prosodic cues indicate discourse importance, they also distinguish different types of information structure in Mandarin. Our findings highlight the fine-grained ability of the language production system to utilise different aspects of acoustic dimensions with great efficiency.

Keywords:

• corrective focus
• new-information focus
• prosodic encoding
• intensity range expansion

Acknowledgements

Earlier version of this work were presented at AMLaP (Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing) 2011, ETAP (Experimental and Theoretical Advances in Prosody) 2, WECOL (Western Conference on Linguistics) 2011 and the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in 2012; we would like to thank the audience members for the valuable comments and suggestions. Thanks also go to the USC Language Processing Lab group for feedback during the development of this project. We would also like to thank the editors of ‘Language and Cognitive Processes’ and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Notes

1. Greif (2010 compared narrow new-information focus with two types of corrective focus: semantic correction and pragmatic correction. Due to length reasons, we will not discuss Greif (2010)'s findings for what he calls ‘pragmatic correction’, since only semantic correction is similar to the corrective focus that we investigated.

2. Chen and Braun (2006)'s study is important, as it is the first prosodic investigation of information structure in Mandarin that investigated different information-structural categories in a way that closely tied them to theoretical work. Their information-structural notions and terminology are based on Steedman (2000): Theme, Rheme, Background and Focus. In our discussion, we refer to their ‘normal rheme focus’ and ‘corrective rheme focus’ as ‘narrow focus’ and ‘corrective focus’ for the sake of consistency. More specifically, Chen and Braun (2006) examine four categories of discourse information: theme background, theme focus, rheme background and rheme focus. Following Steedman (2000)'s framework, these four categories are based on two layers of information structure: a primary distinction between rheme and theme, and a secondary distinction between focus and background. While ‘rheme’ and ‘theme’ roughly correspond to the new and given information as defined in our study, the division between ‘focus’ and ‘background’ is based on prosody – focus is intonationally marked and background is not. Chen and Braun (2006) find that both rheme and focus are marked by lengthening and F0 range expansion, and that the distinction between rheme and theme is prosodically more prominent than the distinction between focus and background. Additionally, and most relevantly for us – they look into two subtypes of rheme focus (essentially, new-information focus and corrective focus), and find that correctively-focused rhemes have bigger F0 ranges than non-correctively-focused rhemes, but do not differ in duration – a finding which contrasts with Greif (2010). As a whole, Chen and Braun (2006)'s findings suggest that different information-structural distinctions can be encoded in the same prosodic dimensions with different degrees of prominence, as well as reflected in different prosodic dimensions.

3. For the verb ‘put’, the variant fang is also possible, in addition to fang-dao and fang-zai. These forms are interchangeable across speakers in this context. Participants were asked to use the one most natural to them; only one participant used the short form fang.

4. Three sentences are missing from the recordings due to technical problems, and two sentences were misspoken. They amount to 1.39% of the data.

5. In this paper, we focus on the by-subject analyses because the design of the study does not allow for by-item analyses of all targets, as the nine target words were ‘cycled’ through the 36 target items. However, if one analyses the nine target words in all four conditions, the statistical patterns closely resemble the by-subject analyses.

6. The analysis comparing given vs. new words in the non-corrective condition do not reach significance, except for the analysis of intensity range: for words in the HH tone group, non-corrective new information has a larger intensity range than non-corrective given information (t(9)=2.519, p <0.05).

7. For corrective focus, Chen and Braun (2006) did not find lengthening and Greif (2010) did not find F0 range expansion, as discussed in the introduction.