Corrective focus in Mandarin Chinese

Meer over het boek

The present study explores the effects of contrastive focus (CF) on prosody in Mandarin Chinese (MC), a tone language. Traditionally, CF in corrections has been defined through semantic alternatives that replace a corrected item, with speaker-hearer assumptions often considered irrelevant. However, the Contrastive Focus Hypothesis (CFH) posits that violations of speaker-hearer beliefs are crucial for identifying an expression as contrastive. This suggests that linguistic markers of CF are limited to instances where the speaker perceives the information as unexpected for the addressee, assuming that a language has grammatical means for marking contrastiveness. Additionally, a counterpresuppositional focus type has been proposed, which corrects presupposed information, distinct from corrective focus. Previous studies have shown that MC marks (wh-)focus through specific adjustments of lexical tones, but little is known about corrective focus compared to wh-focus, and there has been no empirical investigation into how violations of mutual beliefs affect CF realization. This study addresses these gaps by systematically examining two types of corrective foci (COR) through a semi-spontaneous elicitation method, focusing on how foregrounded or asserted material is corrected.