Contrastive study of focus phonetic realization between Jinan dialect and Taiyuan dialect

It is usually considered that focus bears communicative function in discourse, each language has its own ways to realize focus. This paper compares the focus realization of Jinan dialect and Taiyuan dialect. It aims to investigate the similarity and difference of focus realization through examining the variations of mean F0, duration and intensity in both focused and unfocused conditions between these two dialects. The data represents that F0 is the closest acoustic correlate with focus in both dialects. Suppressing the pitch range in the post-focus region and leaving the pitch range of the pre-focus syllables unchanged exist in all the dialects; meanwhile, focus in Jinan dialect is also realized by expanding the pitch range of all the syllables on-focus, but in Taiyuan dialect the pitch range of all the syllables on-focus doesn´t observed significant expanding. Furthermore, no obvious differences in syllable duration and intensity between the focused and unfocused condition are discovered in all these dialects.