Beyong pitch: Exploring Duration, Intensity and Silence in Japanese Focus Marking

Abstract

Building on Jun’s prosodic typology (2005, 2014), this study examines how head and edge languages differ in their strategies for expressing focus. While head languages like English rely on pitch expansion in focus and post-focal compression, edge languages like Japanese are thought to emphasize boundary cues. Inspired by the framework proposed by Mizuguchi and Tateishi (2023), we hypothesized that in educated standard Japanese, focus marking extends beyond pitch modulation to include the boundary cues such as duration and silence insertions. To test this, we analyzed recordings of native speakers of educated standard Japanese producing noun phrases under broad and narrow focus conditions, examining duration, F0 maxima, intensity, and silence insertion at both the word and morpheme levels. The results demonstrate that while F0 maxima cue focus, duration and silence insertion play dominant roles in marking focus and focus position, especially at the word level. Intensity, in contrast, primarily cues accent, though it also signals focus position at the morpheme level in contexts with unaccented initial words, a particularly challenging environment for focus marking. These findings reveal a hybrid prosodic system in educated standard Japanese, where temporal and boundary cues dominate but pitch modulation remains an auxiliary tool. This system reflects the typological distinctions between head and edge languages, with educated standard Japanese relying on a flexible combination of global and local cues to signal focus. Future research should investigate how these cues are processed in perception and whether similar strategies are employed in other syntactic structures, offering broader insights into the prosodic systems of edge languages.

Keywords: Narrow Focus vs. Broad Focus; Japanese; Pitch; Duration; Silence