A Quantitative Study of Focus Shift in Marathi

We study the effect of focus shift on prosodic features for Marathi, a major Indian language. In our analysis, we consider different focus locations and different focus widths. We report observations of fundamental frequency, intensity, and syllabic durations of constituent words of the utterance. F0 is studied via the accent commands of the Fujisaki model. We contrast statements containing narrowly focused content words with broad focused statements. Contexts for narrowly focused items are either contrastive or non-contrastive. Our results show that narrow focus is marked by longer duration of the focused word, and a larger accent command in the focused word. Post-focal effects are observed for duration, intensity and F0. No differences were found between contrastive and non-contrastive focus.