Complex prosodic focus marking in Finnish: Expanding the data landscape

Publication date: May 2016
Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 56
Author(s): Anja Arnhold
By investigating prosody beyond pitch and duration, this article provides a detailed and multifaceted picture of focus marking in a language that differs substantially from more extensively studied languages like English. A production study examined prosodic focus marking in Finnish based on acoustic analyses of 947 short SVO sentences spoken by 17 native speakers. The results indicated effects of information structure on five acoustic measures: f0, duration, intensity, the use of pauses and non-modal voice quality. Words in narrow focus had a larger f0 range, longer duration, larger intensity range and were followed by pauses more often than words in other information structural conditions. Conversely, contextually given words showed a smaller f0 range, shorter duration, and, in post-focal condition, lower intensity. Moreover, realisations with non-modal voice quality were more frequent for all syllables of post-focal given words compared to the broad focus condition, whereas for words in narrow focus, non-modal realisations were more frequent only on the last syllable. Observing these effects in parallel, the findings exceeded previous studies in scope, providing encouragement for a broader approach to the investigation of prosodic focus marking.



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