Phrasal stress in Mandarin disyllabic phrases: an investigation using focus

Mandarin Chinese has been claimed to have phrasal stress which falls on a nonhead constituent: on the modifier in a modifier-noun phrase, and on the object in a verb-object phrase (MODNh and VhOBJ, respectively; the subscript h stands for head, and the stressed constituent is underlined). This NONHEAD STRESS RULE is motivated by the greater information load carried by the nonhead than its syntactic head [1]. Taking NONHEAD STRESS RULE as a point of departure, the current study investigated Mandarin phrasal stress by using focus as a diagnostic tool. 15 pairs of homophonous disyllabic phrases, each consisting of a MODNh phrase and a VhOBJ phrase, were elicited under both BROADFOCUS and NARROWFOCUS. The phonetic correlate of phrasal stress—duration—was measured. The hypothesis tested was that the nonheads have phrasal stress. The results showed that at the phrase level, a MODNh and a homophonous VhOBJ differed significantly in duration ratio, consistent with the interpretation that MODNh exhibits initial stress and VhOBJ exhibits final stress. Moreover, the duration ratio difference was amplified under NARROWFOCUS. However, there also existed cross-stimulus variation, which is argued to be idiosyncratic rather than random. In sum, it is concluded that NONHEAD STRESS RULE, despite being a weak universal, is an important component to Mandarin prosody, and underlies the contrastive stress patterns of MODNh and VhOBJ.