On the temporal domain of focus

Abstract

It is well known that focus affects the pitch of what is being focused.It is much less recognized, however, that focus also extensively affects the pitch ranges of non-focused regions in a sentence.In this paper we show evidence that the temporal domain of focus is much wider than has been generally recognized.We present acoustic, perceptual, and imitational data demonstrating that, in a declarative sentence, focus is realized not only by expanding the pitch range of the focused item, but also by compressing the pitch range of post-focus items, and possibly requiring that the pitch range of pre-focus items remain neutral.We conclude that the domain of a single, narrow focus consists of three temporal zones, with distinct pitch range adjustment for each.These pitch range specifications therefore should be treated as attributes of the focus itself rather than as anything else.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 115 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.