The typology of focus realization of Northern Mandarin

This paper examines the narrow focus realization of Northern Mandarin and takes Dalian, Harbin, Jinan, Tianjin and Xi´an dialect as examples. It aims to investigate the typological commonness of focus realization through examining the variations of mean F0, duration and intensity in both focused and unfocused conditions. The data represents: (1) Mean F0 is found to correlate within the Northern Mandarin dialects; suppressing the pitch range in the post-focus region and leaving the pitch range of the pre-focus syllables unchanged exist in all of five dialects; meanwhile, focus in Dalian, Jinan, Tianjin dialect is also realized by expanding the pitch range of all the syllables on-focus, but in Harbin and Xi´an dialect the pitch range of the second syllable on-focus get a more significant expanding than the first one. (2) Systematic variations in syllable duration and intensity are not significantly different between the focused and unfocused conditions. This is unlike Mandarin, English, and Cantonese. Thus, this represents typological features of focus realization in Northern Mandarin.