Post-focus Compression: Cross-linguistic Distribution and Historical Origin

One of the most important acoustic correlates of prosodic focus is post-focus compression (PFC) — the reduction of pitch range and amplitude of all post-focus components in an utterance. PFC has been found in many Indo-European, Altaic languages, and interestingly, also in Mandarin Chinese. Meanwhile, there have also been reports that many other languages do not have PFC, or lack any clear prosodic marking of focus. This paper presents a brief review of the current state of the art in the investigation of PFC, and discusses a number of hypotheses in regard to this typological division among the world languages. In particular, the idea is explored that the distribution of PFC is related to the historical development of the world languages.

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